


The Lost Children

by vacant houses (the_lost_robot)



Category: Prototype (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon Typical Violence, Gen, Prototype 2 AU, Science Fiction, seriously the worst roommates, weird creepy viral stuff, worst people to be sharing headspace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-12 04:18:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_lost_robot/pseuds/vacant%20houses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prototype 2 AU. New York Zero is on the verge of destruction. Sergeant James Heller is pulled from the Red Zone to take part in a last ditch Blackwatch experiment to turn the tide against the Infection.<br/>Nobody said gaining a creepy voice in his head was part of the deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not mine
> 
> Continuity: Prototype AU. The nuke went off but Mercer doesn't fully recover from it.
> 
> My thanks to my beta, Tayta Malikai for all the late night discussions and brainstorming.

**_  
_ Prologue **

**_  
_**

_Heat._

_He burns._

_Then- wet. It's wet. Wet, wet, wet and he's just so tired._

_He's never slept before but his mind is slipping. Forgetting._

_Unravelling._

_Then- dry._

_Dry and warm, somehow he is pushed ashore. Caught in the crashing waves, he is trapped inside his own capsule of biomass, he is pushed this way and that by the water._

_There's no energy left in him now. He's lost so much of himself, forgot his own shape and he cannot escape. From his limited awareness, he feels something approach. Footsteps on the ground, vibrations transmitted through concrete. He twitches._

_Consume. Consumeconsumeconsume **CONSUME.**_

_But he's too weak to do anything._

_He slips and unravels._

_And discovers how to sleep._

 

X X X X X X

 

"Doctor Koenig? We have a new project for you, something we think you'll find most interesting."

Doctor Anton Koenig coldly studied the Blackwatch colonel who'd invaded his lab without warning. He actually hadn't met the man in charge before; once allocated to the Manhattan situation, he'd buried himself in his work and not stopped since. There had been meetings, the doctor knew, meetings that he'd been invited to and soundly ignored, too busy with his research. And who could blame him, the properties of the Blacklight virus were simply astounding, the possibilities were endless.

Now, it seemed, his actions had come back to bite him in the ass. Koenig did not let this bother him too much; they had asked him here, after all. He was a valuable asset, one that Gentek could not afford to lose.

"What is it? I'm making remarkable progress on the project you brought me in for. Those brutes, the D-Codes? There is so much to be done to refine them and I simply do not have the time for every little-"

"Zeus."

One simple word, yet it shattered Koenig's world.

"What about Zeus?" he asked tightly, trying not to let it get to him. "Is he-is he coming here? Has my work been compromised? Colonel Rooks we must evacuate-"

"Doctor," the Blackwatch colonel broke in. "How willing would you be to work on him?"

"...on him? Colonel, you have my complete attention."

 

Zeus had survived Randall's final solution.

The information was classified beyond top secret and Koenig knew that neither the colonel nor his loyal side kick would hesitate to put a bullet through his head should he turn down the project. An insane thought, as if he'd pass up a chance to study Alex Mercer's infamous legacy. Zeus was nothing like they'd ever seen before, the likes of which had never been hinted before amongst all the viruses they'd extracted from Greene's comatose body.

If they could only duplicate the results in a controlled manner…

The task seemed daunting but unlike most scientists of his caliber and knowledge, Koenig remained unphased by the monumental task he was undertaking. If, in his final moments, Mercer could create a shape-shifting virus in the cramped and unhygienic conditions of a crowded train station, then Koenig was already at an advantage. Time and a laboratory with unlimited resources were on his side.

Then...then they brought Zeus in.

Koenig's hard earned confidence came crashing down.

He stared at the charred black lump that had been transported into his lab by a whole Blackwatch containment unit. This...this was supposed to be Zeus?  A virologist’s wet dream come to life, he held within his hands the remains of the world's first sentient virus and it was nothing like what he'd imagined. He swallowed once, thankful that his containment suit hid his nervousness. All eyes were on him for guidance but this...he was not prepared for this! Rooks had been so tightlipped about everything regarding Zeus but he had completely failed to mention that the recovered remains he was so proud of were burnt to crisp. How exactly was he supposed to work with this?

Mechanically, he reached across the lab bench for a glass rod. He refused to appear stumped before his colleagues. With the rod, Koenig cautiously began to poke the hard mass. He could almost feel the collective flinch that went through the room at his actions.

A thin smile curled his lips. Well, that was why they paid him the big bucks. He certainly wasn't afraid of a test subject in his lab and at his mercy. The black mass had the appearance of Zeus's fearsome armour, the thing must have tried to protect itself from the blast. Koenig wouldn't have believed it possible for anything to remain in the face of a nuke if the evidence was not sitting on his desk.

The first layers flaked off and crumbled under the glass rod. Then, he struck a hard solid layer that no amount of tapping could get past. The extreme heat must have fused the armor into an impenetrable layer. Koenig raised his head and glanced round at his assistants.

"Damian," he said calmly, "Get a tube and take this dust away for analysis. Janet, I want this thing scanned down to the very molecule, I want to know what exactly is inside it. Lieutenant Riley, do we have anything capable of cutting through Zeus's armor?"

The man tilted his head and studied the black lump in front of Koenig. Unlike the rest of his men, the lieutenant did not wear a mask and Koenig watched as a cruel smile spread across the soldier's face. "How about a chainsaw?"

Koenig smiled darkly. "That would be just perfect."

 

The scans had come back inconclusive: there was a layer of something under Zeus's thick skin, but they didn't know what. And the outer layers that crumbled under the lightest touch were useless for any genetic analysis. So they needed to get underneath the armor and find out if there was anything hidden away inside.

It had taken a special chainsaw, one optimized for cutting through concrete in fact, to slice through Zeus's hide. Rooks had approved the request with a certain amount of enthusiasm that characterized the inherent viciousness of Blackwatch. It was nice to believe that as the blade dug in, there was some awareness in Zeus left to feel the pain.

Koenig doubted that it was actually capable of such but still, the thought counted.

When they pulled the blade back, Koenig strode forward and examined the lump. There. Underneath Zeus's thick hide, red and black tentacles writhed. Koenig was quick to poke it with his rod; the tentacles came freely away, curling up around the rod. They were not attached at all to the layer of armor encapsulating them. The extreme heat had indeed fused the outer armor to the point that the rest of Zeus had separated from it, trapped and unable to get out. There was actually very little of the virus left, certainly not enough to force its way out of the charred lump.

Koenig looked up at his assistants. "Janet, get me a containment canister. Damian, some Bloodtox but dilute it down, a thousand times. Get Zeus into storage." He moved away from the bench as theories and experiments began to brew inside his head. Lieutenant Riley fell into step beside him as Koenig headed towards his office. "Well Lieutenant, it looks like pulling me away from the D-Codes isn't turning into a complete waste of time."

The soldier's sharp eyes studied Koenig carefully. "You seem awfully sure that you can do this," Riley observed.

Koenig glanced back at him. "You think I can't?" he demanded, offended.

"Make an injectable form of the Blacklight virus to give Blackwatch soldiers Zeus's powers?" the Blackwatch lieutenant scoffed. "Look out how the D-Codes turned out."

"It can be done."

"If you insist. Just don't disappoint Rooks." There was no mistaking the pointed warning in Riley's words and the dark glint in his eyes.

Of course. Koenig didn't understand the exact nature of the friendship the Colonel had with the lieutenant but he wasn't all that surprised that the man was taking this personally. As if this project didn't mean as much to Koenig as it did to Blackwatch. "I have no intention of failing, Lieutenant," Koenig said sharply. "I take pride in my work. Failure is unacceptable."

Riley snorted at that but made no comment. He glanced darkly back towards Koenig's lab, where the last pieces of Zeus remained. "Speaking of the D-Codes," Koenig suddenly came to a stop and turned to his unwanted companion. "There were many ideas I had for them, theories I didn't get to test out before you pulled me away from there."

"Oh?"

"I wrote up a brief for it, it's in my office. A new project, if Blackwatch and Rooks has the time for it. I call it Project Orion."

 

Koenig threw the lab test results at his bench as he paced around in a huff. There's no denying it, the remains of Zeus that Blackwatch had recovered were useless. Radiation had mutated the sequences severely, he wasn't sure of the extent of the changes but it had been significantly altered from those taken by Karen Parker. Of course, Zeus had also mutated by itself several times since then. It was difficult to tell what was simply natural progression by Zeus and what was radiation at work. But the fact that Zeus had not recovered, that it remained a black and red swirl in a glass canister in the cold room of Koenig's lab, spoke volumes.

Something was wrong with it. No one had the faintest inklings were the fault lay, there was so much they hadn't known about the Blacklight virus before and now Koenig feared its unique abilities had been lost forever.

Rooks would not be pleased. Galloway would not be pleased either. But there was nothing he could do about it. He turned and planted both hands on either side of the lone canister on the bench and glared at it. This was supposed to be it, Gentek's holy grail and Mercer's legacy. The solution to the Infection that had spun out of control in the recent months.

Perhaps he was looking at this the wrong way. His efforts of late had stalled over the damage to Zeus's genome, knowing that he could not restore the virus to its original glory. So instead of trying to fix Zeus, he should take a different approach. Work with what he had.  At the very least, he could develop a system to safely introduce Blacklight into a human without killing it. After that, he could worry about whether the person was another Zeus or not. Once a system was established...they could look at Mercer's original work and try to recreate that instead of working with the end product.

Koenig's face tightened and he glared at the canister that sat on the bench before him. Red tendrils swirled lazily around, ignorant of his anger. Rooks would not be happy. He wanted to see results with Zeus itself and was convinced that the answer lay there. Koenig drummed his fingers impatiently against the bench's surface.

A combined approach, then. He'd find a way to introduce Zeus into a Blackwatch solider and be done with it. Koenig didn't doubt that there was no way to recreate Zeus's powers using the severely mutated sample, but it would technically fulfill what Rooks had asked from him. Then, the doctor could move on to more promising projects and actually accomplish his goals. A safe delivery system would be useful in future lines of research so it would not be a complete waste of time.

Now, to see if he could persuade Rooks to give him the test subjects he needed.

 

"I don't think you understand the scope that you're asking me for. Recreate Zeus but in a test-tube form to create a new generation of super-soldiers?"

"Is it too hard for you, doctor? They assured me you were at the top of the field."

"Top of my- this has nothing to do with it. You have given me substandard samples to work with!"

"We gave you Zeus."

"You gave me what was left of him." An incredulous laugh. "He was at ground zero of a nuclear blast. Do you know what it did to his DNA? It's damaged, hideously mutated."

A pause. "Unusable."

"Then make it work, Doctor."

"I don't think you're listening to me-"

"I don't think you've realized that you do not have a choice."

A nervous swallow. "I- I'll need test subjects. Medical records of all your men and more. I need a genetic profile that can work with Blacklight. Mercer was unique, a one in a million chance and finding another like him- I need as many records as you can find."

"Anything you need Doctor, all you have to do is ask."

 

Of course, it had to come all crashing down. Theory was always easier than the practical.

 

"I need results Keonig, not failure! Those were good men, good Blackwatch soldiers and you wasted them!"

"And I need men with the right genes! You pushed for the experiments to go ahead, you insisted that they should take place even though I said that they were a waste of time and would not work!"

"You are not trying hard enough!"

"You have not given me the resources I need! Blackwatch troops, Blackwatch profiles but you won't look anywhere further! And you need to look further! I told you, Mercer was one in a million and I have been over and over your records of Blackwatch, Blackwatch, Blackwatch and more Blackwatch and -I'm sorry- but that one is not IN Blackwatch."

"Are you seriously suggesting we use a non-Blackwatch troop for this experiment? We cannot risk a Z-Code soldier running amok. That is why we agreed that Blackwatch men would be the best for this."

"Well, then I'm very sorry to disappoint you Colonel but I've been over your damn records and there is NO ONE there. You might as well shelve the project and send me back to somewhere more useful."

A pause. Rook glared at Koenig from across his desk and the doctor barely dared to breath but really, it was not him with his back against the wall. Either option suited him but he was tired of pursuing useless lines of research when he lacked the resources he needed and there were other projects to be working on. The ball was in Rooks' court now.

The Colonel eventually straightened. "...Perhaps then we should try the marines."

 

 

LOADING MILITARY RECORD

 

JAMES HELLER: SERGEANT (123-65-1658)

 

LAST TOUR: IRAQ, 2009 - INTERRUPTED

 

AWARDED: PURPLE HEART, SILVER STAR, IRAQ CAMPAIGN

 

WIFE, COLETTE HELLER: DECEASED

DAUGHTER: AMAYA HELLER: DECEASED

 

KILLED BY CIVILIANS INFECTED WITH MERCER VIRUS

 

SERGEANT HAS REQUESTED POSTING TO RED ZONE

 

LOADING PSYCH REPORT...

 

PSYCH ASSESMENT:

POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

NO REGARD FOR OWN SAFETY

**HOMICIDAL FIXATION ON ALEX MERCER**

 

RECOMMENDATION: **DENY POSTING.** PLACE ON INDEFINITE LEAVE

 

LOADING SITUATION REPORT…

 

35% INCREASE IN INFECTED POPULATION

52% INCREASE IN RED ZONE CASUALTIES

NYZ OPERATION: DETERIORATING

 

REASSESSING TROOP ASSIGNEMENTS…

 

JAMES HELLER, SERGEANT (123-651658)

 

STATUS: REINSTATED. ASSIGN TO RED ZONE

 

"Doctor Koenig, have you seen this?"

"What is it Damian?"

"That last batch of genomes we went through from the UMSC? We found a match."

"Let me see that…oh _my_. Get me Rooks."


	2. Rebirth

_"And I wanna go ride the roller coasters again."_

_"Alright sweetie, we'll take you to ride the roller coasters just as soon as my tour ends. But it's past your bedtime so say goodnight. Put mummy on okay?"_

_"Okay goodnight daddy. I love you."_

_"She's been talking about roller coasters non-stop since we got back."_

_"I wish I could have been there."_

_"Ah, yeah. Me too. I miss you Jimmy. We both too"_

_"Yeah, I miss you too baby."_

 

"UMSC officials have confirmed that there has been a surge in Blacklight infected individuals after a two month drop. The severe fall in numbers had led many to hope that the viral outbreak was almost contained and that the worst was over but now it appears that the virus is getting a second wind. As of today, an elite government military force known as Blackwatch has officially taken control of military operations in New York City."

 

_"I thought all that was over and done with but now they're saying this virus thing is cropping up again. Jimmy, I'm worried here."_

_"Baby, I need you to try and relax, alright? Now, I'm gonna be home in a couple of weeks and maybe we'll go stay with your mum while, just 'til they get things sorted out."_

 

"It's been three months since the last sighting of Alex Mercer. Blackwatch officials have confirmed that the bioterrorist was killed in an explosion several weeks after the outbreak and have been able to identify his remains."

 

_"Now everytime I look out the window, I see Blackwatch troops. Jimmy, they've closed Maya's school! I just- I don't know if we should be here. They-they said stay put and don't go causing any panic."_

_"Well then just stay put and don't go causing any panic, alright. I'll be there tomorrow tonight."_

_"But-"_

_"Collete, go take Maya and go see your mom. Okay baby, if they got the situation contained then there's no reason to doubt them, right?"_

 

"In addition to Manhattan Island, Blackwatch has declared martial law over Brooklyn and Staten Island. UMSC forces have been withdrawn completely from Brooklyn and are being deployed solely in Manhattan and Staten Island. All forms of communication have been cut from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Blackwatch officials have stated that the situation in both boroughs have deteriorated completely and have changed the deployment to see the difference in tactics will have an effect in containing the Blacklight virus."

 

_"I'm sorry I- I just-just feel so far away from you guys."_

_"I miss you daddy."_

_"I miss you too baby girl. But don't worry. Daddy's coming home."_

 

 

"Welcome to the Red Zone, Sergeant. Welcome to hell."

 

"Colonel Rooks? I believe we have a promising candidate for Project Dionysus..."

 

"Know your type, son. Lost someone important to you, friends, family, to the infected, so you came here to make every last one of these mother fuckers burn. Or you die trying in the process. They don't call us the suicide squads for nothing."

 

"Sir? Do we really want to use a marine for the Z-Code project?"

"Have a look at his record, Riley. Suicidal with a homicidal obsession on Alex Mercer. We couldn't ask for anyone better."

 

"Heller. Something strange has come up. Blackwatch has been asking for you, son. Now, I don't care if you die out on patrol or walk into Graham's line of fire or somethin. But Blackwatch? They're sick, they ain't right in the head. It'd be best if you stay as far as possible from them. I don't know what you've done to catch their attention but it won't end well, I can promise you that. No matter what they say, no matter what they offer you, say no. You join up with those baby killers; you're not signing away your life. You're signing away your soul."

 

"Sergeant Heller, we have a proposition for you. We believe you make the ideal candidate for a project of ours. A project called Dionysus..."

 

 

Whispers.

They were the first thing he heard when he awoke. Ghostly voices hissing in his ears, the words just a little too faint and jumbled to make out the words. It was odd but that was not the only thing that was weird.

His body felt off. His skin was crawling- no, writhing. Like he didn't have any bones and all his muscles are just rubbing together. It didn't hurt but it was fucking weird and nauseating.

_They are going to burn me._

A voice, male and guttural suddenly spoke. He flinched at the volume; it was too close, too near his...ears? Ears? Did he have any? It didn't feel like...he didn't feel like have anything resembling a face.

Or a body.

He was trapped. Oh god, maybe he was paralyzed. Was this what it felt like, deaf, blind and numb to the outside world? Trapped within a flesh prison that couldn't respond to his commands.

Shitshitshitshitshit. This wasn't the way he was going to go. They'd promised him, those Blackwatch bastards. Highest probability of success they'd seen. They were going to give him the tools to kill every one of those infected fuckers that had killed his baby girl and his wife.

 _Calm down._  That same voice that he could still hear. But he shouldn't have been able to, he didn't have any ears. Unless...the voice was actually inside his head.

 _I need to get moving. Why can't I move?_ There was a sense of frustration from the voice and it was weird knowing that it didn't come from him.

The presence attention turned from him-them?- (and sweet Jesus, how the hell could he even tell) and focused on something else, like it was listening to something he couldn't hear. Then it came back, alarmed and worried.

_Got to get up._

What-?

 _Got to get up!_ the voice repeated loudly.  _They think it failed. That the experiment failed. They're going to burn it all to ash unless I get up right now and show them that it worked._

Get up? He didn't even have a  _body_. Or, at least once that made sense to him.  _Irrelevant. A body's just a shape, just flesh. Just need to turn what I have into what I remember._

What he remembered? Dimly, a memory flickered of him standing in the mirror. Dark skin, dark eyes, a thickset body, bald head. Nothing happened and the voice's frustration grew. Then, he could feel movement underneath him. Hadn't he been lying on an operating table before this whole thing started?

_They're going to incinerate me! Change, dammit!_

He had no idea what the voice was on about but he was not ready to die like this. The experiment hadto work, there were no other options.  _Fuck it, why won't I-_

The presence  _moved_  inside him, twisting and turning bits of himself that he wasn't even aware of. It was like it had reached straight into his very own core and rearranged him on his most basic levels. Then...then-

Shit.

Fuck. What the fuck was-

His body  _changed_. It was pulling apart and- and- slithering and stretching and contorting and it  _hurt._  Every part was being pulled in every direction all at once and re-shaped and he didn't know what was happening, didn't know which way was up-down-who was he, what was his name? Hands, what were hands, fingers, palm, five digits, nails, bones? Who-what-why- were those teeth and -who was he anyway? A name, he had a name. Mer- no. No, that wasn't him at all. Suddenly, his head - he had a head? - snapped up and eyes he didn't even realize he had opened.

He was sitting up on an operating table, in a room he only vaguely remembered. The movement beneath him had stopped, the people pulling the table had stepped back and were watching him warily. A crowd of guns were pointed straight at him and for a moment he didn't understand, wasn't this what they had wanted. But when he glanced down, his body was still churning, ropes of red and black writhing as they twisted and knotted together to build legs and feet. His new mouth fell open in shock.

What in the fucking world…?

 _Finally_ , the voice said triumphantly. But it sounded exhausted, weak and its presence was fading fast. For one strange moment, he could feel this presence of  _other_  right inside of him, moving through him at the very molecular level. It was terrifying, the sensation. Feeling like a stranger in his own body.

Then, it was gone, all of it was just gone. The voice was swallowed up by a deep dark hole. If it had felt like the presence had been clutching at his very core before, pulling all his strings, now there was only a void. His mind was silent and his body had stopped changing. Everything was still.

"Congratulations, subject Heller," one of the Blackwatch scientists said. "It looks like you pass."

 

_He awakes and he is trapped._

_Something is wrong, everything is wrong._

_He doesn't have ears but he can hear them talking. Sounds like Blackwatch or Gentek. Scientists talking about a project…talking about him?_

_He can't tell._

_It's so hard to concentrate. Something is wrong._

_But he does know when they decide to burn him._

_He tries to get up. Tries to change and defend himself._

_It takes everything he has to heal himself._

_Alex falls._

_He doesn't stop._

_The voices of the condemned scream endlessly as he joins them._

_He unravels and forgets._

 

Heller. His name was James Heller.

He told them that.

"Date of birth?"

He told them that too.

"Do you remember what happened to you?"

Did he remember? He couldn't forget.

"I was serving abroad and there was a viral outbreak in Manhattan. Some fucking terrorist, Alex Mercer, released a lethal virus that infected the population, drove them crazy. Turned them into zombies or some shit. They killed my wife and daughter," and all he could feel was a dull ache at this admission and a slow burning, simmering rage at the man responsible. "I was brought in to be stationed in the Red Zone, suicide watch or whatever the fuck you call it. Then you guys got a hand on my medical records and offered me a place in your beyond top-secret super solider program. Said you could create one-man armies if you had the right genetic profile and that I fit the bill. Best candidate you had. And I said yes and now here we are."

The Blackwatch scientist - Doctor Koenig or whatever the fuck his name was- looked distinctly pleased. Heller was seated in a cell by himself being interviewed by the lab coat from across the glass. The doctor was surrounded by those D-Code super soldiers of Blackwatch and they were keeping a close watch on him, their guns pointed straight at hm. There were little pores in the walls, floor and ceiling that he hadn't quite figured out what they were for.

"How much do you remember about your childhood?"

Heller stared back at the man nonplussed. "What sort of dumb as fuck question is that?"

"Answer the question." It could have been his imagination but the D-Codes might have started to clutch the triggers of their weapons tighter.

"It's vague," Heller replied sharply. "Do you remember everything about your childhood?"

The Blackwatch scientist sighed. "Where did you grow up? The schools you attended, who were your friends. The subjects you took, the sports that you played, places you went to on vacation."

He frowned at the man but then shrugged and obligingly answered the questions to the best of his ability. Koenig listened patiently as his assistant furiously typed notes while Heller reminisced. At times, the doctor consulted a plastic folder on the desk in front of him.

"That matches what we have on file," Koenig said at last, then he leant forward and stared intently at Heller. "How do you feel?"

Heller thought about this question for a while. There were no tendrils anymore, none of the red and black so eerily reminiscent of the Infected. But he couldn't forget it; he didn't know what the experiment had done, but he wasn't sure that this was supposed to be it. The scientists had been cagey about what would happen to him, they'd talked more about his genetic profile and the probabilities of success. The only thing they could assure him of was that he'd be able to handle anything the Infected threw at him, and they'd already seen it in action. Just duplicating the results was the difficult part.

At the time he hadn't cared. He'd been ready for death, ready to do what it took to deal the most damage to the Infected. He'd signed the non-disclosure statements, agreed to all of Blackwatch's beyond top-secret disclaimers and given himself up to them to do what they pleased. He hadn't cared what they did to him so long as they gave him the tools to kill as many Infected as possible.

Now however, after waking up and fearing that he was trapped and paralyzed, he found that he wasn't ready for death just quite yet. It had been a wake-up, a reminder that there was still so much he could do. But as to what they'd done to him...whatever it was, there was no going back.

Time would tell if he'd come to regret it.

"I feel tired," he said flatly. "I'm pretty sure I was a lump of flesh on an operating theater a couple of hours ago, I've had chunks of me cut off to be taken away for further experiments. And then, while I was watching, those chunks of flesh just grew back. Like the way my legs just decided to when I first woke up. Is this what the project was trying to do?"

He could see just how useful accelerated healing would be on the battlefield. But what was the extent of the changes that they had made to him? Was this it?  
"This is part of what we were trying to accomplish," Koenig shuffled his notes and then reached for a remote. He pressed down on a button and activated a wall mounted screen. He then clicked something on his computer and a paused video appeared on the screen. "How much do you know about Alex Mercer, aka code name Zeus?"

Heller tensed at the name, anger building at the man responsible for this entire disaster.

"He's a monster and the leader of a terrorist cell," Heller responded flatly. "All of them dress the same to fool people into thinking there's the only the one guy. There's a lot of crazy stuff said about him on the streets, things like how he can fly, that there's only one of him. That he can kill people with his bare hands and steal their lives, that he can literally become another person. But he's the one who caused all of this."

"All of it true, I'm afraid," Koenig deadpanned.

"Bullshit," he said flatly, military decorum be dammed. He's seen a lot of shit out in the Red Zone, seen the Infected tear apart civilians and Marines alike. But shape-shifting and flying was something he wasn't willing to entertain because then they're all kinds of fucked.

Koenig shrugged. "What you see here is all unaltered Blackwatch footage. This is very real, subject Heller."

He clicked on his computer and the video started. It was of a Blackwatch patrol moving through the streets of Manhattan. Then, something off screen caught the attention of the squad. The camera tilted up to catch sight of a fast moving object launching itself off the building, straight into the patrol and leaving a crater in its wake. When the dust cleared, there was a man standing there and Heller couldn't mistake the outline of Alex Mercer. The image had been branded into his mind since learning of Amaya and Colette's death. The man tore into the soldiers in the video, his hands transforming into deadly claws with a wreath of black and red tendrils.

The video stopped. Sweet Jesus, was Mercer infected? Some special one-of-a-kind variant that he'd never seen before.  _Shit._ Blackwatch had told him they'd seen the results but had never managed to duplicate it again.

Heller stared down at his hands, deceptively human looking but suddenly completely alien to him. Infected. He was infected.

What the fuck had they done…?

Before he even knew it, he was on his feet and then throwing himself at the wall. "What have you done to me?" he roared. His hands writhed and gradually lost their shape, fucking tendrils instead took their place.

The doctor backed away in alarm as the soldier took aim at Heller. "Whoa, hold on there, just a second," Koenig cautioned. "Calm down, Heller, this is what we wanted."

"You turned me into something like Alex fucking Mercer!" Heller gestured sharply to the creepy as fuck tentacles, then slammed an elbow into the clear wall separating him from Blackwatch. "How the hell is this okay?"

"We gave you everything you wanted," the doctor protested. "A way to make every single one of those infected fuckers dead, that's what you said! And now you have it. Mercer was near unstoppable, that is what we have done to you. We have made you invincible. A super soldier, more powerful than anything we've ever even seen-"

Heller turned and drove a tentacled fist into the wall and was rewarded with a sharp crack. He froze, staring incredulously at the cracks beneath his misshapen limb. "What the-" unconsciously, his fingers roughly regained their shape as he traced the broken edges left in the glass.

Distantly, he was aware of Koenig yelping, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot, lower your weapons. Do not agitate the subject!" and a Blackwatch soldier responded with, "Fuck your orders, Doctor! The subject already is agitated!"

"This is my project, Lieutenant. I'm the one in charge here and I say, stand down!"

Heller curled his deformed fingers and punched the wall one last time. It shattered under his fist as he watched, the sound filling his ears with ringing. As the soldier surrounding him backed up, Heller crouched down and picked up a shard from the floor.

"This situation is out of control-"

"If you'd just be patient, Lieutenant, we can still salvage this but not if you jump the gun-"

"Okay," Heller said, as he studied the broken debris in his hand. He didn't know what it was made from, super tough bulletproof glass, or something similar but he did know was that it was never meant to be shattered by a human hand. Just what was this new body capable of? Could he tear through the infected the way Mercer had easily sliced through trained Blackwatch soldiers? "I'll do it."

"-everything will be fine- what did the subject say?

Heller let the shard drop from his hand and straightened up. "I said, I'll do it. I'll be your super soldier, volunteered for this shit, didn't I? Might as well see this thing through."

 

RECORDED TRANSCRIPT FROM PROJECT DIONYSUS.

BRIEFING Z-CODE 01 BY LIEUTENANT CLINT RILEY

"Subject Heller, I'm going to brief you on Alex Mercer and the actual situation here on Manhattan. Mercer infiltrated Gentek, the public side of Blackwatch, as a geneticist. The terrorist cell he belongs to has not yet been identified though we have uncovered messages between him and his handlers. Gentek was attempting to engineer a super soldier serum called Blacklight as a means of reducing causalities for the United State army. Mercer was working on the serum but he sabotaged the project, using it to build a bioweapon. He took the only uncorrupted sample of Blacklight and used it on himself, then released the bioweapon in Penn Station.

That was the initial outbreak. I don't need to tell you what Blacklight did, you saw it every day you were posted to the Red Zone. Blackwatch and UMSC forces were brought in to contain the outbreak but Mercer, or Zeus as we call him, tore through our forces and allowed the infection to spread. He is completely responsible for the situation here and up until now, we haven't had anything that could match him.

That's where you come in. We'd been working on recreating the original Blacklight since the beginning of the outbreak, to even the playing field for our side. But Zeus had been thorough, he wiped out all our records of the serum and we only had limited success. I don't know all the science behind it, but the researchers somehow figured out that certain genes suited Blacklight better and that's how we found you.

Now, according to our intelligence, Zeus has been killed, an explosion took him out. But the outbreak hasn't stopped since his death, if anything three months after his death, it's started gaining momentum. Subject Heller, you are the first of a new force designed to contain the infection. A Z-Code super soldier."

 

DOCTOR ANTON KOENIG'S PERSONAL NOTES ON Z-CODE 01

Project Dionysus is a failure.

Oh, sure, the subject demonstrated properties similar to Zeus, a fact that pleases Rooks and his cohorts greatly. He appears to be capable of shape-shifting, possesses inhuman strength and rapid regeneration, at the very least. But the resemblance is superficial.

Zeus was a viral construct, made from Blacklight itself. It was human only on the exterior but on the inside, it was malleable viral matter. The subject, however, remains mostly human. Our tests so far have been able to confirm this. X-rays reveal bones and internal organs, most of his major body systems remain intact.

The question then becomes what are we dealing with? Our preliminary analysis of the subject's genome reveals that Zeus's genome has actually become incorporated into the subject's. This runs counter to everything we understood about Zeus, which was capable of consuming other organisms into itself and repurposing both flesh and genetic material. This cannot be stressed enough. Lieutenant Riley, whose understanding of biochemistry and genetics rivals that of a stone, has made several complaints to Colonel Rooks about the possibility that the project had resurrected Zeus. From the genetic data alone, this theory can be discarded and thankfully Rooks understands this. The subject has undergone severe mutation but remains, on a fundamental level, human. A fusion between virus and man, perhaps is the best description

How then, does the subject transform? Our current theory is that the subject completely radicalizes the gene expression within target cells, inducing a rapid metamorphosis. The subject's shape-shifting is notably slower and cruder than Zeus's and expends a huge amount of energy to achieve this. The subject's dietary requirements have substantially increased to accommodate for the sheer increase in raw material and energy. In a combat situation however, it is highly unlikely that the subject will be able to change as constantly as Zeus was able to, the subject will have to limit the number of transformations to maximize the usage of this ability.

It has also been hypothesized that Zeus's consumption ability has either been lost or completely mutated. Zeus injected Blacklight into his victims, infecting them and thus allowing it to absorb them into itself. As the subject is human based, it remains to be seen if he can demonstrate such viral properties.

Whilst exploring the extent of the subject's capabilities seems like a fascinating area of research, it is not a project that requires my full attention or supervision. I have no interest in being saddled with a failed experiment. Project Orion has several lines of promising research that I would like to pursue, if Rooks would only give me permission to leave this one. Galloway has been unable to change his mind on this matter and so I'm stuck here, with an increasingly hostile test subject and the difficult Lieutenant assigned to him. Rooks seems confident that the subject can be controlled by encouraging and enforcing his hateful fixation on Zeus and the Infection combined with a large amount of misinformation. I'm afraid that it will take very little for things to fall through with the subject, he seems to have little awareness and reverence for what we have managed to achieve for him. If I have one regret, it is that I fought Rooks over the usage of non-Blackwatch personnel. There's one thing that can be said about Blackwatch, their grunts are mindlessly loyal and fanatically dedicated to their cause.

The subject is not like that. We must tread carefully to ensure that the subject does not turn on us.

…

…

…

PS. The subject is a jerk. And he broke my favorite test tube, along with a lot of important laboratory equipment in that last test. And his cell. This is the fifth cell we've had to replace.

 

Lieutenant Clint Riley was studying his charge over the cameras installed in his cell when Rooks came in. "I don't like this, sir," he announced without hesitation.

"You're the best man for this job," the colonel replied steadily. "The only one I trust with this responsibility."

"Seen the way Koenig moons over his test subject? It's pretty sick," Riley muttered in disgust.

"What did you expect?" Rooks snorted disdainfully. "Gentek's white coats live for this shit."

Riley made a noise in agreement. He then turned his attention back to the camera and focused on the test subject. Rooks studied his subordinate and longtime confidante closely. "The subject bothers you?" he observed neutrally.

Riley placed both hands on the console in front of him and rested his weight there. "I just think we'll have a hell of a job trying to contain it if it puts its mind to escaping. It's the closest thing we have to Zeus. General Randall never even came close to stopping it."

Rooks joined him on the cameras, watching as the doctor tried to engage in conversation with the Z-Code. Koenig was attempting to take blood samples but the subject growled at him every time he got close to him with a needle. "Koenig says he still is a man and a man can be killed. He integrated the virus; the virus did not integrate him. If he turns out to be a threat, you'll take him down."

Riley scoffed quietly, shaking his head. "You know, the first thing Koenig did was show the subject just what Mercer was capable of. Gave it an idea of how fucked we are if it decided to turn on us." It would be a disaster, one purely of Blackwatch's making and even with all the safe-guards they had taken, Riley did not feel assured that it was enough.

"It won't come to that," Rooks spoke confidently. "The infected killed his family. He lives now only because he wants to see them dead. We both saw his psych profile. He may not be Blackwatch but he is still ideal for this project."

"Doesn't change the fact that Koenig is a menace, sir." The Lieutenant looked only half-heartedly convinced by his commander's attempts to reassure him.

"Come on, Riley. Eight D-Codes assigned to your personal command. And, once Project Orion gets up and running, you'll get upgraded with their finest anti-Z-Code troops. Command's been more than generous to you."

Riley looked up at that in surprise. "Koenig's proposals actually got through?" Whilst the Lieutenant wasn't interested in Gentek research, if he was going to be forced to work with Koenig, it'd probably be best if he knew what the man was up to. Rooks, on the other hand, actually understood Koenig's research and read his experimental reports, the high level genetics and virology shit that got the white coats all excited.

"They did. Say what you want about Koenig, the coat knows his stuff. The Orion Project will draw strictly from Blackwatch ranks. We won't have to worry about conflicts of interest."

If Rooks thought that Project Orion would be enough to handle the subject...Riley gave the cameras one last glance, then calmly switched them off.

"Oh, and Riley?"

"Sir?"

Rooks smiled warmly. "Worst comes to worst, make sure you burn him."

The Lieutenant answered that with a sharp grin. "With pleasure, sir," he promised as he followed his commander out of the room. It was in companionable silence that they made their way down the hallway until Rooks paused mid-stride.

"All records of Colette and Amaya Heller have been purged, haven't they?"

It took Riley less than a second to recall the information as he'd personally overseen that particular detail of this operation. "All databases except from the on-site Alpha level database and the off-site backup have been scrubbed of those records."

"Have them purged too. According to official records, they died in an infected attack, let there be nothing left to say otherwise."


	3. Settling In

 

_He awakes and he is trapped._

_There's another mind with him in here, one he doesn't remember consuming. One that is in control of his-their?- body._

_Something has gone wrong. Blackwatch...Blackwatch has done something to him. Captured him. But he's still so tired and it takes so much for him just to get a thought out. Time is distorted, he can barely keep track of what is happening._

_He reaches out, tries to speak._

_Then he falls. He always falls._

_He sleeps._

_He forgets._

 

Heller dreams of a broken city.

It's New York, but not from the way he's used to seeing it. He's familiar with the damage and the monsters and the blood splatters and gore. But now, he looks down on the city, a bird's eye view as he easily leaps and glides through the air. He propels himself at the next building and doesn't stop, his hands and feet are powerful enough to push him up the world and defy gravity. His momentum carries him up and up, until he reaches the top.

Heller grabs the ledge and launches himself over it to the roof of the building. Only when he glances back at his path does he realize that he has to be dreaming, there's no way he could ever have gotten here in real life. The sight of the city lures him up the edge and he rests one foot daringly against the drop. What did it matter if he fell? Either he'd wake up or he'd die, neither option bothered him unduly.

The city, though, has his full attention as it burns. Once upon a time, it had been home. It's not now, hasn't been for a long time. Not since Colette and Maya had been taken from him.

He doesn't watch for too long though. His instincts twinge in warning and Heller whirls round to the sight of-

_-A blurred figure-_

_-Standing right behind him-_

_-Underneath the hood there's no face, no features at all-_

_-One pale hand reaching towards him and Heller is paralyzed-_

_-It has a face now, no, it has too many faces-_

_-He's helpless at its approach-_

_-Young, old, male, female-_

_-They scream, they all scream-_

_-The hand reaches for him-_

_-Why won't they just stop-_

The hand pushes him off the ledge.

Heller falls.

 

Heller awoke with a gasp to a darkened cell. He lay still for several minutes as he panted for air and tried to control his breathing. The details of the dream faded quickly but he was left deeply unsettled and gripped by a profound feeling of wrongness. Not that anything had been right since he'd woken up on the damn gurney, ropes of churning black and red making up his body.

He didn't sleep easily that night.

 

Tests.

Tests and tests and more fucking tests.

If there was one thing that Koenig liked, it was testing. Heller bore through it all with a great deal of impatience. He got that he was their one of a kind special snowflake. He did. He also got that Blackwatch didn't know what the fuck he was or what the hell they were doing. Heck, Heller didn't understand what was going on either. The whole transforming part of his body into a weapon thing? Not as easy as Blackwatch believed. Heller just did not know what made the process work. Sometimes he could do it, his flesh would literally crawl and melt into indistinct shapes. Other times...just nothing.

At least, there was always Lieutenant Jerkass to entertain him. That had been a memorable first meeting. He'd recognised the guy who wanted Heller wasted when he'd flipped his shit and destroyed a bulletproof glass wall with his bare hands. He'd also handled Heller's debriefing but hadn't stuck around to introduce himself.

"Subject, I'm Lieutenant Riley. I am your handler for this program, which basically means that if I think you're so much as breathing the wrong way, I am authorized to burn your infected ass to ash."

Big words from a tough guy, Lieutenant Jerkass had come all the way into Heller's cell to make the threat right to his face. Heller could respect the balls it took to do that, most of Blackwatch seemed to prefer to stick to the outside of the cell. With the exception of Koenig, but Heller had long figured that nothing scared that psychopath.

"Handler huh," Heller had said, sizing Riley out before giving his nails a disinterested flick and examining them instead. "So you're the guy I can complain to about the room service?"

"No, I'm the guy who gets the pleasure of beating your ass into shape," Riley had replied without missing a beat. He gave a smile that was all sharp teeth and no friendliness. "Flamethrowers may be involved if you can't keep up."

Heller had choked a harsh laugh at that. "Are you calling me fat?" he'd demanded incredulously.

The Blackwatch lieutenant had actually lost interest in the conversation by that point and was already half-way out the door. He'd clearly dismissed Heller from his mind. His point had been made, his name had been given and he had more work to do that sit around and chat with the mutated freak. "Course you are," he called over his shoulder as he left. "I know how much you eat, I'm the guy signing off all the forms for your meals. You are one fat motherfucker. "

Upon reflection, he'd realized the lieutenant was right. He definitely was eating a heck of a lot more, it just wasn't showing. With that realization came others. The slow decline in the amount sleep he was getting. The slowing of his heart rate. His improved vision. Little things but adding up to the whole that somewhere Heller was losing the little bits that made him a human being. That he was becoming something other, some  _more._

The lieutenant hadn't given Heller time to stew over it. He'd meant what he'd said, he dragged Heller into an intense training routine that should have left him dead on his feet and yet Heller got through it without breaking a sweat. It was...fucked, there was no denying it. His body had suddenly become a very strange and foreign thing. He didn't know how it worked anymore. And that was terrifying, not knowing what it would do.

Like the whispers.

Shit, they were the scariest thing about the whole situation. Just sometimes, the world would just-just-

Fuck.

It was happening now.

_-who-what-you?_

Static had fallen over his ears. He couldn't hear the rest of world, Koenig's rapid fire scientific observations and theories. All there was were the whispers.  _He hunts-alleyway, rooftop-consumes-needs an exit- help, somebody help-_

Indistinct, soft, he couldn't make out the words but it was like a million voices having a direct line to his brain all at once. It would start off with just a few, then the number of voices would build up until it was a crescendo of sound inside his head.

_-he becomes-_

Then-

"Subject! Subject!" a sharp sting of pain in Heller's arm returned the world to him. He looked up to see Koenig glaring at him and pulling a needle out of his arm.

"What-"

"I won't ask you again, subject. Raise your arm so I can take a blood sample."

"Another one?" Heller groaned but obligingly held out his arm. The whispers were gone, like they never were there. "I thought you were done with them. Why do you need so many?"

Koenig gave him another withering look as he unwrapped a new needle. "The sheer magnitude of what we've done to you might be beyond your comprehension but surely you can understand that we need to document everything, subject."

Heller grunted as the needle dug into his skin. "Everything, doctor?"

"Yes."

Heller had pretty much figured by this point that some part of his sanity must have taken a hit. It wouldn't have surprised him. He'd been fucked in the head before he'd gotten into this thing and he was pretty damn sure that he wasn't supposed to have been deployed out in the Red Zone in the first place. So the whispers, he figured they were just an expression of his delirium. And since Lieutenant Jerkass was looking for any excuse to put a bullet in Heller's head, keeping quiet on the whole craziness inside his brain, he'd decided, was the best way to handle things.

Still. There were other tidbits to offer Koenig.

"I can't remember the last time I took a shit," Heller replied bluntly. He was kinda curious to see if he could gross Koenig out. "But I'm pretty sure it was before I lay down on that table of yours."

The doctor was not fazed by this piece of information. "Yes, we know. That was two weeks ago," he replied absentmindedly as he took the blood sample.

"Holy fuck, you guys actually pay attention to stuff like that? You people need a new hobby."

"Not at all. We are scientists, we observe, we deduce, we unravel. Injecting the virus into you has changed your metabolic rates. Your body has new nutritional needs, you've been eating more and yet you do not seem to produce any waste. It seems like we've streamlined the efficiency of whatever currently passes for your digestive system now, everything that you consume is required and used. Nothing is going to waste, hence you no longer need to excrete."

Heller sat in stunned silence as the doctor finished up, packing the latest blood sample carefully away. "Like I said," Heller grunted as Koenig cleared away the used needles. "You people really need to get a life if figuring out why I don't need to take a crap is something you do for fun."

 

One of these days, Heller really needed to figure this whole transforming thing out.

If the rumours he'd heard serving out in the Red Zone were true...then Mercer had been an unstoppable human shaped wrecking machine. He'd torn through entire platoons and squads of Blackwatch personnel and Marines. In the mean time, Heller kept going over that video in his head. Kept replaying Mercer massacring all those soldiers. He didn't know how Mercer had done it, how he just transformed his body into a weapon like that. The lab coats either didn't know how or weren't telling him. The big fucking mystery of it all.  _How did Mercer do it?_  Inside his mind, he watched as Mercer killed and killed again, trying to figure out how he did it.

Because once he knew how, Heller was going to take these skills and wipe the Infected out. One by one if he had to. Mercer might be gone but Heller would destroy every last bit of his work. There was no way he was going to stop, not until every last of those monsters was dead.

If only he could figure this whole thing out, of course.

"Look subject, this really shouldn't be that hard." It had been a long day. The lieutenant, Riley, looked like he was about to snap and strangle Heller as he stood by himself in the middle of the training room. One D-Code stood in attendance at the end of a room, looking as distinctly unimpressed as it was possible for a mutant super soldier wearing a gas mask could. Riley pinched his nose in frustration but waved Heller on. "How the fuck are you so bad at this?"

"I don't know man," Heller retorted. "Got any pointers on how to turn my fist into a blade so I can shove it down your throat? Because I could go for that."

"At this point in time, I'd welcome it. It would be proof that for a mutated freak, you aren't a complete failure."

"Fuck you."

"That's fuck you, sir. Now get back to work and show me a pair of claws or some shit before I blow out your infected brains and then mine so we can be put out of our misery. Because you fucking suck at this and I'm sick of staring at your face. It's ugly. I don't know how you live with it."

Yeah, Heller wasn't entirely sure how their working relationship had developed some weird form of camaraderie. Probably from all the hours spent going absolutely nowhere in this room. Like, Heller knew that the lieutenant would absolutely murder the shit out of him if he stepped out of line or at least try to, Heller wasn't entirely sure just how durable he was now. Anyway, Riley was Blackwatch and they were all sick and twisted motherfuckers, 100% dedicated to their cause. Burn their own and all. But at some point, Riley had started talking back to him. Most of it was verbal abuse but he didn't seem to mind Heller retaliating with his own. Probably because Heller didn't rate to anything above resident lab freak experiment in his mind or something.

Because that's what Heller was to Blackwatch, he wasn't a part of them, he wasn't military. Just their property to do as they pleased with him. And he'd signed up for this all on his own free will.

"Keep telling yourself that. I know you're just jealous."

Riley sighed loudly and slumped against the wall he was leaning up against, though his hand never strayed far from the pistol tucked into his belt. Heller turned his attention back to work but he couldn't resist one last taunt. "Hey, Lieutenant?"

"What?"

"It's been weeks since I last took a dump. You know that?"

The lieutenant groaned. "Oh God. Yes, I know. Stop reminding me about it. I know. I get it. You're a fucking mutant whose superpower is being unable to shit. Congratulations, No-Shit King."

"So long as you know it," Heller smirked. Those were the last words they exchanged for about an hour. Heller tried, he really did, but it just didn't work. He didn't know how to make it go, how to get his body to do the weird creepy tentacle stuff. Whatever it was that had worked the first couple of times...just wasn't working any more. And it didn't make sense because Heller was pretty certain that he was still changing in some way, Koenig wouldn't be studying every bit of data so thoroughly from his daily examinations if he wasn't.

Eventually, Riley had enough. "Stop," he said. He shot the D-Code a look and the soldier came to attention behind Heller. "We're going to try something else. Come on, ugly."

"You always ask so nicely," Heller muttered under his breath but he followed Riley obligingly. The lieutenant led him through the base, to an area Heller hadn't been before. They wound up in a room with large windows overlooking a bigger room. Something about it raised Heller's hackles, it took him a moment to realise that there was dried blood on the floor of the second room. He turned to Riley with a questioningly look on his face, something he wouldn't have done had this been the regular military. But here, as Blackwatch's experimental chew-toy, nobody seemed to give a fuck whether he kept to military discipline or not, mainly because they tended to ignore that he was an actual person.

"Get down there, subject," Riley said, nodding towards a door.

The D-Code loomed menacingly behind Heller. He frowned at them but did as he was told. The room was pretty bare, aside from the blood stains, there really was nothing else in there. There were some vents set into the floor and a series of large doors were on the other side of the room. Heller walked into the middle of the room and waited for Riley to give his next instruction.

Heller could see up into the other room and that Riley had approached the monitors and was leaning up to a microphone. "Right, here are the rules," Riley said curtly. "You go in, we'll release the walkers. You kill those monsters as quickly as possible. Killing them is the objective, nothing else. And maybe because you're in some danger, we'll see some results. We don't see anything what we want to see, we flood the room with some diluted Bloodtox. Nice stuff, that shit burns the Infected and if it's concentrated enough, it'll kill them. I hear Zeus almost died the first time they used it on him so if you don't want to be burnt, you better show us what we want to see."

Oh yeah, there's the Blackwatch every marine in the Red Zone knew and loathed. Heller had a few seconds to go,  _walkers, they've got walkers in here?_  Then those big doors started to retract into the ceiling and yep, there were fucking walkers behind them. The walkers hissed at him, the sound didn't faze him after spending so long in the Red Zone. But, holy shit, they were way too close for his liking and he didn't have a gun.

He was way over his head. He didn't know how to do any of the things Mercer could do. And what the hell, if he failed, Riley, the asshole, was going to burn him. He was completely and utterly fucked.

"Beginning training session," a monotone voice spoke over the loudspeakers.

"Fuck you and your fucking training session, you motherfucker!"

The walkers lunged for him, a crowd of broken and bloodied people, driven out of their minds by the infection. Heller backpedalled, trying to keep out of their grasp. He needed something. Anything. A blade, claws, that weird stretchy arm thing, the shield. Come on, come on.

Adrenaline pumped through his body as he panicked. A walker sliced at his arm but he barely even felt it, he shoved her away and rolled to the side.

Then-

Static.

Shit.

The voices exploded through his mind like a freight train, one voice louder than the others and screaming clearly over them and Heller stumbled, reeling from the noise.

_-DANGER. FIGHT. KILL. FIGHT. DEFEND.-_

It cut off abruptly like it suddenly noticed the situation Heller was in.  _Infected. Walkers. Why-claws. Got to defend. Claws, shield, kill-_

His arms writhed and changed. Fingers became claws, then one arm distorted into a crude shield, nothing like the one he'd seen Mercer use. The other arm lost its shape altogether, collapsing into a swirling mass of tentacles.

_What the-_

Holy shit, in heartbeat, Heller recognized what it was. It was the presence. The one that had been there when he first woke up.  _That's not normal-why-should have worked-it the parasite again?_

A walker bit into his arm, then shrieked as the presence strengthened inside Heller and suddenly he regained a set of claws on both hands. Heller drove them straight into the infected and it was gross. Just gross. He'd seen a lot of shit out on the battlefield but he'd never ripped out guts and internal organs with his own hands. The slimy infected bags of flesh dropped to floor and exploded from the impact, spraying gore everywhere. Blood spurted all over him as he pulled out and went for the next one and it was easy, frightfully easy to fight them off.

This, this was what he'd wanted. A dark glee began to build in him as he tore and cut and sliced his way through the Infected crowd. All the while, that voice just kept going on in his head.

_-No. Wait, why did I-? Not what I was going to- What was going on?-_

Heller decimated the last of the walkers and came to a stop in the center of the room. Blood painted the floor, body parts were strewn about haphazardly and it stunk. It was difficult to believe that he'd done this with barely a thought. Hand to hand combat had always been about strategy, reading and knowing what your opponent was going to do before he did it. This was just mindless slaughter.

"Well done, subject," Riley's voice crackled over the loudspeaker. "That's enough for now, you've got the lab heads all excited to see you now. I'm not sure if you'll have any of that stuff that passes for blood for you by the time it's all over."

 

Now, Heller liked to think that he was an observant guy. Whatever that thing was inside his head, the voice? It had something to do with allowing him to transform himself. It had kept jabbering on in confusion as Koenig had flitted about him and running even more experiments. The tests left him flat out exhausted but Heller was able to demonstrate the claws again and even get one arm transformed all the way to a blade. But the evening crawled on, each shift became more difficult. In the meanwhile, that voice just kept going. Seemed incapable of understanding the situation, it kept wondering where they were and what was going on. It was really fucking creepy, having the commentary going. Like someone else was stuck inside his brain.

_-Why am I-Blackwatch, is that Blackwatch?-how did they- where is-what-_

Eventually, though, the constant stream eased towards the end of the tests. The voice sounded drowsy, of all things, and Heller could feel the presence getting fainter and fainter, till eventually it was gone like before. And once that happened, he lost it. Koenig had been in the middle of extracting blood from his palm when both arms writhed and lost the claws, reverting back to plain human hands instead.

"Subject!" Koenig rebuked, the needle had snapped with the upheaval caused by transformation. The doctor scowled and handed the syringe off to an assistant before reaching over for another. He waited impatiently for Heller to shapeshift again. "I do not have all day, subject. Transform again."

"I can't," Heller gritted out as he focused on his hands. It was gone, both the presence and whatever it was that made his body work. He felt weak, like all his strength had left him.

Koenig studied him with a cold assessing gaze. "I find that hard to believe when you were just doing it now."

"Yeah, and I'm trying and it's not working."

Koenig settled back to rest his weight against the edge of a table. He continued to study Heller before coming to a decision. He turned to Riley, who was overseeing the experiments from his own corner of the room. "Lieutenant, take him back to the training room and set him up against the walkers again."

Heller's head snapped up at that and he glanced across to Riley. Back to the walkers? He'd barely had any time to recover! Shit, he was near dead on his feet and he was really hungry right now.

"Come on subject," Riley commanded, gesturing for Heller to climb to his feet.

"Sir, I don't think-" Heller began to protest.

"On your fucking feet, subject!" Heller blinked and suddenly Riley was holding a pistol against his forehead, his face grim and utterly serious.

Heller wasn't certain he could take a bullet to the head. The extent of his healing abilities had been the one thing they'd never gotten around to testing. Fuck, he'd gotten complacent with Riley. Was used to the weird comradeship they'd built inside the training room. But Riley was Blackwatch, they lived to kill things like Heller and would laugh while they were doing it to boot.

Heller carefully held out his hands as he got to his feet. "Yes, sir," he said lowly as Riley moved the gun away only to replace it at the back of Heller's neck.

He was marched back to the training room like that, the cold metal a constant reminder to him of Blackwatch ruthlessness. He was shoved into the room; the carnage he'd wrecked there still hadn't been cleaned up. Dark blood coated the floor and the smell of decay and rot wafted up to him from the ravaged bodies. Heller turned back just as Riley pressed a button to close the door.

"Sir, Riley you ass. I'm telling you, I can't do this-!"

There was absolutely nothing in the lieutenant's eyes as the heavy door finally shut. Heller slammed his fists against it, the hard metal rattled but did not budge. Heller was not certain that even his enhanced strength would be able to move it. He turned back, eyes scouring the room for anything that he could use as a weapon.

Already, the door was opening. This time, when the infected surged, he was too slow on his feet. He was caught in the crowd of decaying bodies that still somehow managed to move despite the disease that plagued them. Heller tried to fight back but the strength he'd once possessed was gone. His fists ineffectively pounded against the people pushing against him.

Quicker than he had a chance to think, Heller went down, his body mauled by the infected. Agony wracked his body as their tore into him, fingers gouging into his flesh and ripping chunks.

As his body hit the floor, dimly he was aware of Riley shouting something over the loudspeaker. Too late, Heller thoughts drifted, too fucking late to realise you were wrong about this.

 

From the personal notes of Doctor Anton Koenig

Colonel Rooks is pleased to see progress with Project Dionysus. The subject's ability to shapeshift appears to be tied to some sort of adrenal response. In a situation in which he is stressed or feel endangered, he is capable of transforming himself in ways similar to Zeus was. However, the subject remains inferior to the original, he rapidly drains his body's reserves of energy and raw material for shapeshifting to the point he loses the ability to do so. This will severely limit his combat capabilities, as I'd warned Rooks but the colonel appears to be ignoring me in that regard. The subject's healing capabilities are also similarly curtailed, we do not know the full extent of them but Lieutenant Riley has insisted that they are not to be tested directly. He worries that if the subject is made aware of the degree of his invulnerability, he will become increasingly difficult to control. Rooks is backing his lackey on this so we are attempting to evaluate how well the subject can regenerate from the tissue samples we have extracted. Progress has been slow; it is difficult to extrapolate what applies to the subject and what doesn't.

What is interesting is that every time the subject shapeshifts, he mutates further by incorporating more of Zeus's genome into himself. Whole chunks of his genome are changing from human to viral. I am willing to consider that Dionysus may not have failed and that with enough time, the subject will gain Zeus's full range of abilities. I have dropped my requests to be transferred. Given enough time, I may be able to modify the remaining sample of Zeus in our possession so as to adapt it to Blackwatch volunteers. This will be slow progress, I'd hoped that samples taken from the subject would speed up the process but curiously enough, all samples lack the inherent infectivity of the Blacklight virus. This might be an artefact from the subject's current dominant human genome. Perhaps the most obvious example is the apparent lack of the ability to consume other organisms. We have so far seen no manifestation of this ability, not even when the subject was forced into a situation of overwhelming odds and depleted body reserves.

 

In the end, Riley had saved him.

Heller lay still on his military cot and marvelled that he was still alive and breathing. His skin itched and crawled where he could remember the infected tearing into his flesh and ripping him apart. It was all fixed now, Heller didn't know how long he'd been out or how Blackwatch had healed him. He had vague memories of shouting, the screeching of the walkers as they tore into his body, the sound of gunshots, bright lights and the indifferent faces of Gentek scientists as they bent over his body and studied him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The memories were vague which didn't surprise Heller all that much. He'd been certain that was had been it. That he was going to die on the floor of the training room, buried underneath the bulk of the infected.

Then he'd woken up on his bunk like nothing had happened, like it was just a bad dream. For a few minutes, he'd actually been convinced that he'd imagined the whole series of events.

But his body still ached in half-remembered trauma. Physically, there was nothing wrong with him, Heller had awoken to find himself covered in bandages but pulling them off had revealed undamaged skin. As inhuman as his body was now, his core remained fundamentally human.

Still. Heller stretched himself and studied his hands carefully. He tried focusing, on making them change.

Nothing happened.

No red or black tendrils. No claws.

Nothing.

The whispers inside his head were quiet. Asleep. Heller sighed and sat up. Without them, without that thing, the intangible presence of something, he didn't seem able to do much. It wasn't like before, when he'd first woken up and he'd had a small measure of control. Now it all seemed to be tied to the voices. It was clear that his body was still mutating and adjusting to what they'd done to him but this felt like a step back. Heller leaned his head back against the wall and flexed his hands in a useless attempt to get things going. Nothing happened, his mind drifted over the recent events.

Lieutenant Jerk-Ass had saved him. After shoving him into a room full of hungry walkers despite his protests. There was that to deal with. Heller knew that signing on with Blackwatch had meant pretty much signing away his life. He thought he'd been prepared for that. Only an idiot would think Blackwatch would go easy on him, super special Gentek project or not. But going down like that, alone, without any support while Blackwatch looked on impassively...that was enough to shake anyone. A wake-up call. Obviously, Heller was a significant investment to Blackwatch, one they couldn't afford to lose due to carelessness. But it was a reminder that they wouldn't hesitate to push well beyond his limits.

He also wasn't sure what to make of Riley, on one hand the man wouldn't hesitate to kill him if Heller stepped out of line. On the other hand, he was the only one in this hell hole who even remotely acknowledged that Heller was a person. Albeit, somewhere amidst the taunts and insults the man sent his way. A single bit of normality in the midst of all the chaos that had taken over his life.

Heller's mind went over the walkers. They had been people once, normal human beings. He'd killed plenty of them back in the Red Zone but that had always been with a gun. Not ripping them apart with his bare hands like the way they'd done to his family. It was kind of crazy to think that there was so little difference between them. They been transformed by Mercer's bioweapon and he'd been changed by Gentek's attempt to recreate the original serum. The more Heller thought about it, the more he realised that there was a very small divide between him and the infected. He knew very little about the science that had created the virus but he figured that there couldn't be a lot of differences between the thing that had been injected into him and the virus that ravaged the city. Mercer had used the only uncorrupted sample on himself, whatever Gentek had used had to have been engineered from the deadly form of Blacklight.

Just what would it take to turn Heller into something like the walkers? Having grown up exposed to a healthy amount of pop culture filled with movies about science and experiments gone wrong, the cynical part of his mind assumed that it would take very little. He was a living, breathing science experiment that would fit right in with some big budget movie on the silver screen.

That wasn't the way he wanted to end up, mindless and hungry for human flesh, a monster like the creatures that killed his family. With that perspective in mind, it was almost a relief knowing that Riley and the rest of Blackwatch wouldn't hesitate to kill him if he ever descended to their level.

Heller sighed and settled back, his gaze fell to his hands again. This time, he studied them intently. His eyes traced ridges in his palm, then followed his veins down his arm. He'd had a scar from a burn on his right wrist, Heller suddenly remembered. An accident from cooking he'd received only a couple of months ago, the mark was yet to fade.

It was gone now.

The ex-Marine wasn't precisely alarmed; he was more surprised than anything. Examination of the rest of his body for the many scars he'd accumulated during his military career revealed that they were gone too. His skin was completely unbroken. It hadn't occurred to him to wonder how precise his accelerated healing could be. He'd just known it worked and had put him back on his feet faster than a normal human after he'd been mauled by the walkers.

Which brought him back to something he'd been wondering for a while now.

If Blackwatch did decide to kill him, how well would he take a bullet to the head?

 

"So what's it like?" Riley asked a week later as he leant his weight against the table behind him as Heller trekked a bloody path out of the training room.

Heller stopped and glared at him. He was covered in blood, the plain clothes that Blackwatch gave him were soaked with it. The lieutenant was calmly fingering the pistol by his side. It was slightly unnerving, now that Heller knew how fast the man could draw the weapon and he still wasn't sure just what he could actually survive. "What does it matter to you, sir?" he sneered as the presence, still wound up from the training session, bristled. It was his constant companion now, whispering words that Heller could only make out half the time. Apparently, when he was well-rested and fed, the presence would wake up when he was in danger, giving him access to his shapeshifting abilities.

The lieutenant dismissively swept his eyes over the former marine. "You want the infected dead," he stated simply.

Heller narrowed his eyes suspiciously as he tried to figure out what Riley's angle was. "Course I do. Wouldn't be here if I didn't," he spat. Heller had requested a transfer into the Red Zone after all, no one expected to come out alive from those patrols.

"You know that there's every chance of you becoming exactly like one of them," Riley lifted the pistol up and pointed it at him. "My job, put you down before that happens."

_He will kill you,_  the voice asserted.  _Don't trust him._

This was not new information to Heller. Riley had mentioned it offhand enough times that it had become background noise. "I know," Heller gritted out. It still managed to surprise him how at peace he'd become with the concept over the last couple of days since he'd first come to the realisation. If he succumbed to the mindlessness of the infected...he wanted to be put down. As fast as possible with the least amount of casualties. And Riley would do it. Heller had seen the stoniness in the lieutenant's eyes often enough, directed straight at him. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was often calculating the quickest way to kill Heller. The former Marine saw it most often whenever he stepped out of the training room, after he'd slaughtered his way through hoards of walkers using weapons built by his own body. Every time that happened, it'd reset Riley back to pure Blackwatch and it would take him a while before he responded to Heller's attitude with anything other than straight up threats.

"So, it matters to me to know what is going on with you," Riley stated calmly, dropping his hand and gazing straight at Heller. "We need to know as much as possible and every bit of information you tell us helps us improve on the next generation of Z-Codes. We'll need them to contain the outbreak. You won't talk to the psychologist-"

"-Denvers is an idiot-"

"So talk to me, soldier," the lieutenant glanced down at a pair of military fatigues beside him. "Colonel Rooks has almost approved you for combat out in the field. But I won't take you out there until I'm certain that I can rely on you."

That brought Heller up short. To have the experiments end and to be out there finally doing things.  _Blackwatch lies_ , the voice hissed inside his brain.  _They'll never trust you._

He didn't need them to trust him. He just wanted to be out there, putting an end to the infection.

"Fine," Heller allowed cautiously.

"What's it like?"

"What, to be a handsome bastard like me?" the former Marine smirked, deciding to be deliberately difficult and to test the lieutenant's patience.

Riley sighed, a sign that he wasn't as wound up as usual even though his grip was still tight on that pistol. His next words confirmed it. "No dipshit. To be a mutated infected abomination."

Heller snorted. "It's like puberty all over again. Body doing crazy shit I don't even know what for. Except this time there's no promise of getting laid by the end of it."

Unexpectedly, Riley laughed at that. But the seriousness never left his eyes as he gazed back at Heller. "Aside from that?"

Heller warred with himself. He still had not mentioned the voice to anyone at all, mainly because he was not certain what exactly it was. Part of him was very certain that it was a manifestation of a psychosis, he was bound to have one after everything he'd been through. It was most often 'awake' when Heller was in combat, it seemed to grasp intuitively how to shapeshift whilst Heller was left struggling behind. If Blackwatch treated him and he lost it...then he wouldn't be able to fight. They'd never send him out into the field. He'd spend the rest of his life trapped within Gentek's laboratories.

"I'm fine," he answered somberly, meeting Riley's penetrating gaze. "World's been turned inside and out but I know what I need to do. You can count on me out there. Sir."

Riley calmly tossed the fatigues to him. "Better dress up then. You've got a date with the Yellow Zone."

 

"Why Riley, it almost sounds like you've made a friend," Rooks observed after his debriefing with his subordinate. They had been discussing and finalizing the details of their first incursion into the field with the Z-Code.

The lieutenant scowled. "I haven't," he answered in a clipped voice. "Koenig may treat him like a scientific curiosity but every time we send him into the training room, he shows what he really is."

"A Z-Code?"

"A monster." Riley's hands did not search for the grip of his gun. The weight of it was enough to provide comfort even as his memories reviewed the aftermath of each training session. The subject was dangerous, a disaster waiting to happen, a bomb about to go off in their faces. If they were sensible, they'd have put him down long ago.

But they couldn't. They were desperate, the situation in the Red Zone had long ago spiralled out beyond Blackwatch control. Now they were racing against time to find a solution, using the Yellow Zone as a testing ground to find something. As much as Riley hated to admit it, the subject was one of their more promising options. For all Koenig's promises and assurances, he hadn't made much headway in adapting his experiment to generate additional Z-Codes out of those who didn't meet the stringent genetic requirements.

That didn't mean Riley liked the situation. Or the subject. Heller was an asshole and Riley never hesitated to let him know where the power lay. Couldn't afford allowing the infected abomination to get any ideas that Riley was afraid of him, to think that he was weak. They didn't know the extent of Heller's abilities but from what Riley understood, he was slowly mutating towards what Zeus had been.

Zeus had never been afraid of Blackwatch. If, by some way, Riley could drill it in to the subject's head that Blackwatch was not to be fucked with...maybe there was some way to head things off. He simply didn't trust the subject, they should have never used a Marine, even the most bloodthirsty or battle hardened of them eventually baulked at the sacrifices Blackwatch made without hesitation. Though Heller had been remarkably complaint with everything Blackwatch and Gentek had thrown at him aside from the second time they'd put him in with the walkers. Apparently, he did have his limits. Riley had half expected to see those gruesome tendrils erupt out of him, rip the walkers apart and then pull them into his own body like Zeus would have done.

But he hadn't. Riley had been surprised. So had Koenig. Evidently, he hadn't reached Zeus's level yet. But still. It had been weird seeing him go down under a bunch of infected that Zeus would have effortlessly demolished. The explanation that Koenig had given had been filled with complicated technoblabble. From what Riley had managed to understand was that it boiled down to Heller's genes were still predominantly human and he instead got the raw materials he needed for shapeshifting by eating normal food. This severely limited his shapeshifting abilities and once he'd depleted those reserves, he was vulnerable. Still healed inhumanly fast though.

If Heller turned on them...they'd have to wear him down to that point of weakness then take him down. It would cost them lives, many of them. Riley had been studying Heller's fighting style, the abomination wasn't as fast as Zeus but he put a lot of power into his moves. For the most part, he stuck to the methodical movements of the Marines but get him flustered enough and his body would devolve into the elastic parlour like flow that belonged to Zeus.

Riley wondered about that. Was that something inherent about the Blackwatch virus? Mercer had been no gymnast but Zeus had automatically pushed himself to do inhuman feats within the first few moments of its life. Or perhaps it was something more sinister, Zeus himself peeking out from underneath Heller's surface. Koenig was certain that that viral abomination was gone, that what he'd engineered granted Heller Zeus's abilities and nothing more but who the hell understood how a sentient virus worked anyway?

Hell, for all they knew, Zeus could have eaten Heller and was now playing them all for fools.

This was something Rooks and Riley had discussed repeatedly. For all the faith Rooks had in the good doctor's capabilities, he was aware that this was a dangerous gamble. The only comfort they could draw so far is that this wasn't Zeus's style. He'd never displayed the patience for long term infiltration, he normally kept up his charade until he got inside a base and achieved whatever his objective was. They had drawn this out far too long and put Heller through all sorts of shit that Zeus wouldn't have tolerated.

Well. All bets were off now. They'd take the subject into the Yellow Zone and turn him lose. Hopefully nothing would come from it other than Heller decimating the infected population.

Hopefully.

 

Heller dreams of New York City. He is crouched on the ledge of a building, peering down onto the wasted streets. The infection has reached this area, there is not a human in sight and blood and gore slicks the street. For a moment, Heller contemplates dropping down. Some part of him knows that he will survive the plunge. It's tempting.

He leans forward. His weights shifts as he prepares himself. As Heller pushes himself up off the ground to stand up, his eyes catch sight of movement across the street. He looks up, and it's like staring into a mirror. Like right exactly in the middle of the street, the world decided to copy itself. Across from him, standing straight on an identical building and gazing right at him is a hooded figure.

The person is blurred, like Heller's eyes can't focus on him. After staring at him, the hood tilts almost questioningly then the figure turns away, dismissing Heller completely.

Something tells Heller that the stranger has answers. He doesn't think twice about the impossibility of making it, he gathers himself up and leaps after the figure.

The blurred person looks back. At that moment, somehow, Heller can make out a single cold blue eye staring straight at him. It sends a jolt right through his body, like something has just cut his strings. Gravity reaches out to take hold of him-

Heller falls.

 

Heller jerked awake on his bed. The presence inside his head was awake and alive and he could  _feel_  that it was lucid for once.

_Mercer_ , it said.  _My name is Alex Mercer_.


	4. Late Night Trainwreck

_He awakes._

_He remembers._

_But it's not going to last, already he can feel himself slipping. It'll get easier after this, he thinks. The remembering. There's a lot more of him than there was before._

_Still, he'll hold onto what he has while it lasts._

_His name._

 

Six simple words and Heller's world breaks. 

_Alex Mercer._

Heller lay on his bunk, paralysed by this revelation. Bewildered anger began to build in him as he struggled to understand what was going on. _No,_ he insisted blankly. _Impossible._ His thoughts looped and chased each other around because this could not be happening- 

_I don't understand. It's never been like this before, usually...usually..._

_What the fuck are you-_

Images flicked through his mind. Memories. From lives that were never his. _Or utterly fucked up delusions and holy mother of fuck did he hope it was the craziness setting in._ Ripping a Blackwatch soldier apart with his bare hands, then tendrils digging in, down, down, down and consuming the man until there was nothing left. Absorbing every piece of the soldier's life, his knowledge, his memories, even his face- 

 _...I never killed you...don't remember…_ the presence -Alex fucking Mercer?- mused drowsily. There was a fog of confusion, a sense of murkiness that permeated the voice. _But I remember them all..._

 _What are you?_ Heller demanded again, shaking in disgust and horror as he tried to comprehend what he'd just seen. Tried, failed and refused- _The hell is going on? You're not human, you can't be human, you're-_

 _-was never him. The virus - Alex Mercer...he was just my creator,_ the voice laughed bitterly. _I hunt, I consume, I kill, I become. Which begs the question,_ the voice slurred as it grew weaker. _What are you?_  

The presence -Alex Mercer or whoever the fuck it was- went silent again, leaving Heller alone with a question that chilled him to the core. 

What the hell had Blackwatch done to him and what the fuck was going on…? 

 _I'm going fucking insane,_ Heller thought to himself. Then again, crazy people didn't question their own sanity, did they? By that line of reasoning, he was most assuredly sane and 100% fucked. Alex Mercer was -Heller had no idea how but someone was going to meet a messy end at his hands for this- supposedly inside Heller's head. His hands curled into fists and it was all too tempting to climb to his feet and- what? 

Heller paused in front of the door to his room and wavered. His breath grew harsh as he stared it down. Come on. It wouldn't take much. He could destroy it. One punch and then he was out and he would- 

Go on a rampage? Kill as many Blackwatch as possible? 

Isn't that what Mercer had done? 

No. That brought him down hard and fast. He jerked back from the door. He was not Mercer. ( _They'd said they'd made him **like** Mercer but they'd lied. Blackwatch had fucking lied to him-_ ) He had to think about this. Mysterious fucking crazy voice in his head be dammed. With effort, Heller turned his back on the door, clenching his fists and forcing them to his side.

So. Think. Like the damn marine he was supposed to be.

Fast.

A voice inside his head thought it was- Heller paused and realized this was a voice _inside_ his head. He knew he'd been skirting the line of insanity for a long time, had suspected the whispers were a part of it. Maybe…

Maybe this was it.

Which begged the question of why exactly would a part of his brain have decided to believe that it was the man who'd ruined his life and taken everything from him. But then again, wasn't insanity all about NOT making sense?

So either he was fucking crazy (highly possible?) or Mercer was really inside his brain somehow (better fucking not be possible).

Blackwatch had said that Mercer had worked on a super soldier serum. Had stolen the only working sample and corrupted the rest into the virus that now devastated New York. Nobody had said anything about him not being a, a- ( _a monster,_ and if Mercer was a monster, then what did that make Heller?) or him being able to eat people and steal their lives.

Or maybe his subconscious had just finally broken. Ain't no way you could just transfer a dead man's mind into someone else's head. Except-

Well. Fuck. What else would have Blackwatch done with Mercer's dead body? By every account Heller had heard, Mercer had been a one man army, every military in the world would be scrambling to get their hands on something like him. And they hadn't actually told Heller how they'd recreated the original super soldier serum but Heller was willing to bet that it would have involved using the only source of uncorrupted material they had. 

So what exactly had they injected into him? Blackwatch had been vague on the details and Heller hadn't let it bother him at the time, he hadn't cared enough about his life to question them then. Could Mercer's twisted will be so strong that it had been passed on and into him?

Impossible, he would have scoffed. Sounded like something straight outta science fiction. But so was his life right now at that moment. If there was a zombie virus ravaging the city and turning ordinary folks into monsters and if he could alter his body and turn it into a weapon then who was to say Mercer -who appeared to be able to eat people and absorb their memories if what he'd just _seen -hallucinated, it had to have been a hallucination-_ was to be trusted- couldn't be transferred through his own genetic material?

Heller punched the wall beside him with an angered bellow and it crumpled beneath his fist. Stupid, he scowled at himself, stupid. He'd been complacent from the start of this whole mess, trusted Blackwatch to fuck with him on a fundamental level and yet he'd expected not to be _completely_ screwed over at the same time? They couldn't be trusted with a pet rock, let alone the entire civilian population of New York City. They had his _profile_ for fuck's sake, they had known that he hated Alex Mercer with every fibre of his being and yet they had still stuck a needle into him and injected the fucker straight into his bones.

Shit, if they knew that Mercer was in him, would they even do anything? Maybe this was what they wanted all along. Heller had never exactly thought of Blackwatch as being on his side, more that they had mutual goals, and had trusted in that. But maybe Blackwatch had been playing on Mercer's team all this time instead.

They hadn’t told him that they'd turn him into something like Mercer, had let that nasty surprise make itself known when he'd woken up in their labs. He'd been fine with it in the end because Heller had thought it'd be enough to tear down the legacy the man had left behind. But that should have been the first warning sign. Should have taken it for a sign of things to come.

They wanted whatever Mercer had been. 

And Heller, Heller had been nothing more than a means to that goal. Koenig had made it more than abundantly clear through his snide comments that Heller wasn't anywhere near Mercer's level. Was it really too much of a stretch then, to think that Blackwatch would do anything to get Mercer's powers back?

_Mercer infiltrated Gentek, the public side of Blackwatch, as a geneticist._

That's what they told him. That's all they had told him. But- _Blackwatch lies_. Maybe Blackwatch had been in on this whole mess right from the start.

_How much do you know about Alex Mercer, aka code name Zeus?_

_...that he can kill people with his bare hands and steals their lives, that he can literally become another person…_

_All of it true, I'm afraid._

Holy fuck, Koenig had even said it. Right then, right at the start but he hadn't believed it because he hadn’t known then what they'd done to him. They knew that, Blackwatch fucking knew that. Was that what was happening to him?

_Mercer can literally become another person._

Shit, shiiiit. Shitshitshitshit.

Blackwatch had fucking known. Was that all he was, just incubating Alex Mercer inside him for them until Mercer reached out and walked away in his own skin?

Jeesus fucking Christ, what had he agreed to, really?

"Subject, what the fuck is wrong with you?" Riley's voice came through the hidden speakers above him. The lieutenant's voice was slurred slightly with sleep. Whoever was on the security cams must have just woke the lieutenant up. Heller wanted to reach through the speakers and smash Riley's brain out. "You better settle down. If I have to come down there, I'll gas the chambers, don't think I won't."

Would he really? Would Blackwatch bother killing him, if they knew Mercer was in his head, or was this all part of their plan?

...or was the voice just a part of his own madness? What if it was just him and he told Blackwatch? They'd put him down and he'd never get his chance to hit back at the Infected. Destroy that which had taken his family from him.

He didn't know anything. He didn't know enough. What was right, who to trust, who was lying and who wasn't. He could be going crazy. He might not be. He just didn't fucking know...

Heller glared at the door in front of him. It would be easy; he knew, easy to burst out of this cell. Then he'd tear his way through the facility to shake answers out of Koenig. Find out what exactly they had done to him, how Alex Mercer was tied into what was going on with him.

And yet-

He didn't move.

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Go to sleep, dickwad."

Think damnit.

Heller's intel was solely lacking. Maybe it was all inside his head or maybe Mercer was really in there or whatever the fuck was going on. Blackwatch, on the other hand, had been studying the hell out of him these past couple of months. If he made a move now-

They would kill him before he'd even have a chance to unravel what was going on. He knew what the pores in the walls were for, Riley had once made an offhand remark about the entire facility being wired for Bloodtox. Those pores had been in every room Heller had been to on base. And Lieutenant Jerkass had described many times, in great detail and with a large amount of sadistic glee, just what Bloodtox did to the Infected. Then he'd dragged Heller down to watch a practical demonstration on a walker.

Afterwards, Riley had pulled out the chunks of tissue Koenig had taken from Heller's body only that morning. The good doctor had protested at the theft but Riley had gone ahead and dumped the samples into a clear canister of Bloodtox. Heller had watched as bits of his own flesh, _pieces of his own body_ , had melted in the stuff right in front of his eyes.

'You're infected enough that Bloodtox will work on you,' the lieutenant had said, waving his fingers at Heller. He'd dipped them in the Bloodtox to show that the chemical was harmless to the uninfected.

It... had been an extremely effective lesson. A particularly graphic one too, seeing parts of himself dissolve like that. Even after everything Heller had been put through, maybe he could take a bullet in the head. Maybe. But he wasn't willing to test himself against Bloodtox.

If he was going to start something, it couldn't be here.

Tomorrow Riley was taking him out to Yellow Zone. To fight the Infected. And the presence - _Alex Mercer?_ \- would be awake. It woke up when he was in a fight or in danger. He might be able to get some answers out of the damn voice then.

  
  
_There's a voice. It has questions._

_It gives him something to focus on; he claws out bits and pieces of what he remembers. Pulls himself together bit by bit. Separates himself from the voices of the dead._

_Talking's never been his strong suit but it'll help him fill in the blank spots._

_He answers._

_Then sleeps._

  
  
"Riley?" Rooks frowned at the doorway. He'd been on his way to a meeting with Koenig about the lack of progress in some aspects of Project Dionysus when he'd passed the security booth and caught sight of his subordinate.

The lieutenant was up early, studying the video footage of the subject from the previous night. He wasn't scheduled to run their first field test with the Z-code for another four hours. Normally, he would have spent this time checking the mission brief and making sure that everything was prepared. In fact, that had been on yesterday's schedule for today.

But then last night, the subject had acted up.

It wasn't the first time, though it had been the first unprovoked incident. Heller had trashed his cell a couple of times when he'd first been settling in. That had been a combination of the subject's bullheadedness and his newfound but uncontrolled strength clashing with Blackwatch discipline and routine. Once he'd adjusted and got a better handle over himself, the damage had stopped. There hadn't been an incident in weeks. Despite what he'd been through, the warning labels stamped all over his file and the mutations that were slowly rendering sleep a moot point for him, Heller was quiet during the night.

Maybe it was just a one off thing.

Riley frowned, watched on the screen in front of him as Heller woke up, stared blankly at the ceiling before getting up like he was about to bust the door down. Security had had a fit at that, had come extremely close to locking down the base and flooding it with Bloodtox. Then Heller had driven a fist into the wall and seemed to settle. That was it. No obvious signs of distress, just a random assault on the wall like it had personally insulted the subject's parents. Heller hadn't even responded to Riley and the subject was always prepared to talk shit back at him. That was almost a warning sign in itself.

Though Heller had seemed to settle at the threat of Bloodtox. Which, as fair as Riley was concerned, was a close one. The base might be wired for Bloodtox but Heller still had enough human in him that he could power through it, if he wanted. Riley had demonstrated the effects of it in front of Heller, using the subject's own tissue samples. But he'd dipped them in Bloodtox concentrated to the point that it'd actually harm even uninfected people. The lieutenant had applied a counteragent to his hand before orchestrating the whole demonstration but even still he'd come out of it with a few burns that had slowly healed over the next couple of days.

The thing was, Riley had drilled himself as meticulously as he could about the subject. Heller was Riley's responsibility, the most dangerous live grenade ever placed into Riley's hands. Riley didn't kid himself, he was probably first in line to die if anything went wrong with the subject. His real concern lay with all the other damage Heller could cause, to Blackwatch and New York. If the subject went off the deep end and joined the Infected...that could be a tipping point that weighed heavily in the Infected's favour.

The situation in New York was incredibly precarious. Despite Blackwatch's best efforts, the Infection showed no sign of stopping. If anything, it was spreading, slowly and surely in the Yellow Zone. But it didn't make sense or match what they knew about the virus. The Infection should have fallen apart with Greene dead. And Mercer had been reduced to a few tendrils trapped in Koenig's lab downstairs and the rest of him subsumed within Heller. There had been no signs of a runner, someone to guide the Infected and keep them co-ordinated. And yet they still were. It didn't make any sense.

Just like the subject's actions.

Damnit. Technically, nothing had happened. It could have been anything, pre-mission jitters, a nightmare. But it had been close enough that Riley had dragged several psychologists out of bed to analyse the weirdness. It was incredibly frustrating that Heller didn't trust anyone in Blackwatch enough to confide in them. The closest person they had was Riley himself, and there was a lot of difference between trading insults and sharing a man's deeper thoughts.

The only one who had any idea of what was going on in Heller's head was the man himself.

Riley raised his head and met Rooks' expectant gaze, one eyebrow arched at him.

"Rooks," he acknowledged curtly. "The subject's tantrum last night… just left me little unsettled."

"You think it was more than battle nerves?" the colonel asked sharply.

"Is that what Denvers is putting it down as?"

Rooks shrugged. "Until we know more, yes."

The lieutenant stared at the monitor then sighed heavily and glanced up to meet Rooks' steady gaze again. "I don't know what it is. The subject's been… quiet all morning. Answers when you call him but he normally tries to wind up Koenig and the pet eggheads during his daily tests. Hasn't been a peep out of him. Could be just pre-mission jitters..." he trailed off into silence, frustrated by the mystery.

"But you don't think that's it?"

"But I don't want to assume anything," Riley corrected. "The subject didn't exactly come to us with a glowing psyche profile. He might never succumb to the Infection but that doesn't mean he can't go off into the deep end on his own."

Rooks frowned but conceded this point. They'd been relying on Heller's homicidal fixation on Mercer to keep him complaint under Blackwatch's control. But the man was, well, inherently unstable. It wouldn't have been a problem except... there was that meeting with Koenig to get to about the man's lack of results for Phase 2. Heller had been meant to be a prototype, a starting point they'd use to kickstart a line of Z-Codes. But the good doctor's research had stalled as of late. At the rate they were going, Heller might end up being their only Z-Code.

Rooks didn't bother telling Riley to keep a close eye on the subject. Such an order would be redundant by this point. So he clapped a hand on Riley's shoulder.

"I have faith in you," he told his closest friend.

The concern that tightened Riley's face eased slightly. It would never be gone completely. For as long as Rooks had known him, Riley had his back and the colonel knew he could rely on him to act as an extension of his own will. Rooks was the one who made the plans and strategies, Riley was the one who executed them.

Riley snorted and shook his head. His lips quirked, but not exactly into a smile. "Yeah, yeah, don't you have a meeting to get to?" He said pointedly.

Rooks glanced at the time, then shot the lieutenant a rueful look. "On my way."

 

**From the Personal Notes of Doctor Anton Koenig:**

Had a meeting with Rooks today.

It didn't go well.

~~Some people really have no appreciation for science or genius. Sure, I'll just click my fingers and it'll fix a SEVERELY IRRADIATED DNA SAMPLE. NO PROBLEM. NO REFERENCE GENOME, NO UNCORRUPTED SAMPLES. NOTHING.~~

Today is the first field test for the subject. It should really be intere

~~WHY CAN'T WE CULTURE THE SUBJECT'S CELLS IN VITRO? WHAT ARE WE MISSING? WRONG CARBOHYDRATE SOURCE? NOT ENOUGH SODIUM??? DIETARY OBERSVATIONS SHOW THAT THE SUBJECT WILL EAT JUST ABOUT ANYTHING. MAYBE JUST AN OVERALL INCREASE IN NUTRIENTS????~~

Proposal from Rooks re: cloning test subject - has merit? Technically, yes, we have plenty of samples of the subject's genetic material taken prior to the commencement of Project Dionysus. If we can't get viable genetic candidates for the Project, cloning ourselves some candidates could be a last resort.

The question becomes whether Rooks is willing to wait the fifteen to twenty years for his new soldiers to reach maturity.

Note #1: ask Rooks about increasing funding to Gentek's accelerated aging research. It may increase the viability of this proposal.

Note #2: Gentek doesn't have a childcare program. Ask him about it anyway.

Note #3: I have no idea how a man of Rooks' scientific calibre can come up with these proposals. The man knows better. He really does. ~~AND YET HE STILL~~

  
Heller took one step outside the armoury and came up short, arm halfway slung through his combat vest. Lieutenant Jerkass had been waiting outside the door and he subjected Heller to a long, penetrating, _accusing_ stare. Heller stared back suspiciously and wondered if the game was already up. Did Riley know what had happened last night? Did he know about-

_Mercer. My name is Alex Mercer._

-the whole shitstorm of crazy Heller had been through the night before?

"Subject," Riley grunted at last. Heller straightened up, shoulders tightening in tension. Was this it? Was he about to- "You woke me up at 2am in the morning, you asshole. I know your brain is too stupid to comprehend the purpose of walls but stick to freaking the security folks out in the daylight hours."

Heller's mouth fell open dumbly. Of all things- His jaw worked a few times before he regained himself and finished pulling the vest on. "Why, sir. I'm touched by how much you care," he sneered. "I'll try to keep the howling down, wouldn't want you to miss out on your beauty sleep."

Oddly enough, Riley actually seemed to relax at this. "Come on, dipshit. You're all prettied up for your date with the Yellow Zone. Let's move."

Heller silently fell in line behind the lieutenant as he followed Riley, heading across the base to fetch the rest of the team. Suspicion lingered in Heller's eyes as he stared at Riley's back.

_Does he know? Does anyone of them know?_

He clenched his fists and stuck them behind his back.

_Once I know whose fault this is, I'll make them pay._

"Seriously though," Riley said casually. He didn't turn his head to address Heller, just continued on ahead. "What was that? A nightmare? You stressed about the mission? Or just really hate walls?"

The former marine actually blinked at Riley's back. Was the lieutenant...seriously trying to have this talk? Heller didn't think either of them were the type of guy to be bothered with the deep feelings stuff. Hadn't yesterday hit their lifetime quota? Or maybe, a paranoid part of Heller pondered, Riley was checking in to see if Heller had spontaneously become Mercer overnight. If that was the case though, why all the threats to kill him, if this was what they wanted?

...maybe it was because they knew it wasn't what _he_ wanted.

There had to be an answer to this whole damn mystery. Somewhere. Damnit.

"It was the walls," Heller deadpanned. "Guess I just don't understand them."

Riley snorted. If he was annoyed that Heller had sidestepped the question, it didn't seem to have an impact on his tone, which had defaulted already to acerbic and sarcastic.

"Anyone ever tell you they're not for busting your fists against? Try your head next time; it'll save everyone the trouble."

"Is this the voice of experience talking?"

"Only way I'm able to deal with your face day in and day out."

"By killing off your brain cells?" Heller smirked.

"Have to dumb myself down to your level." Riley paused, glanced over to Heller. The man's jaw worked once before he forged on ahead. He'd been blunt yesterday and it had worked in his favour. "Listen jackass, I'm only going to say this once. Last night's episode, that was new. Are you still field ready?"

Heller thought it over. Last night had been... _terrifying-_

_-confusing-_

_-fucking out of this world-_

_-got no clue who to fucking trust but it sure ain't you-_

_-think I'm going crazy-_

_-pal, you got any idea what you fucktards have done to me?-_

_-and if you even did, would you even care? Or was this what you assholes wanted?-_

"You know what, Lieutenant? I'm not even sure myself. Think it was a really bad nightmare. It's been a while since I've been on active duty," Heller replied lightly. He snorted at himself. "Shit, you'd think I was heading into the Red Zone or something."

Riley frowned at him and Heller stared blandly back, waiting for the man to call him out. What exactly would Riley do if he thought Heller was lying? Pull him from the mission? Make him sit down with the head doctors until they figured out what was going on inside his brain? Come on, believe him, jackass.

The lieutenant grimaced at some unknown thought then turned away. "The Yellow Zone has its own horrors," the man said instead, voice neutral. "Don't go thinking it's a walk in the park, asshole."  
Was that it? What the hell was that? Had Riley taken him at his word or was something else going on? Heller couldn't tell but it seemed the mission was still on, at the very least.

_...wasn't it only yesterday that he told the lieutenant that he could rely on him?_

The faintest traces of guilt prickled at him for only a moment.

But-

_Blackwatch lies._

Yeah, well so could he.


	5. The Yellow Zone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: All I can say was that I was meant to have this out months ago. Once again, I've broken the chapter up and shoved stuff into the next one. Enjoy!  
> And thanks, as always, to Tayta. This fic goes nowhere without him.

Heller hadn't actually spent much time in the Yellow Zone. After completing his tour and returning to the States, only to learn what had happened to his family…he'd gotten himself shuttled straight into the Red Zone. Then, he'd spent the last couple of month buried in Blackwatch's labs but he hadn't taken a step outside. He knew, vaguely, that things were bad in the Yellow Zone, though not beyond saving the way the Red Zone was. What wasn't clear was where exactly the Yellow Zone's problems were stemming from. Heller had heard all sorts of nasty rumours that Blackwatch had their dirty paws all over it.

If they did, then perhaps they were attempting to conceal it right now. They'd stuck Heller in the back of an armoured personnel carrier, in the windowless cabin of the APC to transport him over, preventing him from getting a glimpse of the outside world. 

'Don't want to ruin the surprise, asshole,' had been Riley's tense explanation.

'Think I'm a little too old for birthday parties, lieutenant,' had been Heller's retort.

One thing Heller couldn't mistake was the scent of rot, blood and Infected. It probably wasn't as strong as it was in the Red Zone; nonetheless, his nose had undergone quite the upgrade since then. It seeped into the APC's cabin. It was like standing outside in the Red Zone again.

Something unpleasant inside him stirred.

Heller's eyes narrowed and he glared at the ceiling of the APC. That better not be Mercer. Or rather, well. He hoped it was the voice and that the voice didn't belong to Mercer. Or, even better, no mysterious voices at all, inside his head.

But, as things stood, he'd settle for answers. Any of them. Preferably on the not Mercer side of the equation.

"-hey!" Riley's gloved hand suddenly came into focus. The lieutenant had been waving it in front of Heller's face, trying to get his attention. Heller started as he came back to himself, he shot Riley a glare before calming himself and bringing his head back into the game. Riley calmly pulled his arm back, like he hadn't been risking a nasty evisceration if Heller had lashed out in surprise, and replaced his grip on his M4A1 rifle.

"Wake the fuck up subject. It's almost show time. Time to see if that ugly mug of yours will make the Infected piss themselves to death."

"But you said I looked pretty," Heller muttered under his breath, before his brain caught up with his mouth and he cursed himself. It was one thing to sling insults when it was just them...

Riley stiffened. One of the D-Codes sitting next to Heller snorted. The lieutenant zeroed in on him immediately. "What was that? You got something you'd like to share with the rest of the class, Michaels?"

It was, Heller reflected, pretty unfair that the D-Codes could hide behind those masks. Because none of the amusement that had to be hiding in the guy's face came out when he answered Riley with a neutral, "No, sir."

Then again, Heller wasn't certain he wanted the sort of treatment that created D-Codes. At least he still could pass for human.

…Shit, he was getting used to this.

He could pass for human, except for, you know, the tentacles and being Infected and stuff.

_…just like fucking Mercer._

Okay, so maybe he'd rather have received the D-Code version of this super soldier bullshit. Not that it would have been an option open to him as a marine.

…anything's gotta be better than this though. Kinda funny how you think you've hit rock bottom and sign up for some inhumane experimentation, thinking that there's no way things can get any worse, only to find out, actually they can.

A man's always got more left to lose.

The APC drew to a halt. Riley reached over and unlatched the door then pushed it open. Seamlessly he and the D-Codes dismounted. Heller pushed himself up and followed. His feet hit the city's pavement for the first time in months. Riley wandered off to the side a little, speaking into a handset while the three D-Codes flanked Heller. Heller took a deep breath, taking a quick glance at the sky before scanning his environment with a trained eye. The neighbourhood was quiet, not a civilian in sight. Scared off by Blackwatch or driven away by the Infected that lurked around here?

Another APC had arrived before them and already discharged its passengers, regular Blackwatch soldiers. A third rolled up; bringing the number of troops up to fifteen, excluding Heller.

Fifteen troops to watch Heller run around and attempt to not get himself killed.

When Riley had remarked it was show time, he'd meant it in more ways than one. The team following Heller had helmet mounted cameras to catch his every action and record it for the scientists back at base to coo over. It was kinda weird to see the Blackwatch troops do last minute equipment checks and not have a rifle of his own to look over. Heller's hands itched at the emptiness before he reminded himself firmly that he didn't need a weapon.

He was one.

One of the D-Codes caught him looking. The other super soldier paused, then gave the Javelin missile launcher he was holding a loving pat and pointed two fingers at Heller. Charming. Heller didn't doubt the soldier was probably grinning nastily under the mask. Heller sneered back at the D-Code before looking away.

Wait, had that been Michaels? Heller glanced suspiciously back at the three D-Codes, then realised he couldn't actually tell the difference between them. Blackwatch assholes all looked the same.

Riley finished his conversation and re-joined the squad. The soldiers snapped to attention at his approach. "According to Red Crown, we should have a two and a half mile radius clear of any civilians." The lieutenant narrowed his eyes at Heller and it was clear who his next words were intended for. "If they wander over here, that's unfortunate but not our priority. Our target's an abandoned warehouse one block over. According to the latest reports, it's on its way to being turned into a Hive. No hunters have been spotted yet but be prepared for a worst case scenario. Subject, you get to take point. The rest of us will follow."

Heller glared back Riley but didn't protest about civilians. _Fucking Blackwatch_. Every marine knew where the organisation stood when it came to civilian causalities. No point in arguing in the here and now, he'd make his own decisions if that bridge needed to be crossed.

Maybe Riley picked up the hostility in Heller's thoughts or maybe it was just Riley being a dick. "You so much as twitch in a way I don't like out here and you're dead, subject," the Blackwatch soldier warned.

The lieutenant might not have a convenient supply of Bloodtox on him right now, but he did have plenty of lead and three D-Codes at his disposal. And Heller...Heller-

Still didn't have any fucking intel about this situation. Now wasn't the time to be starting something. And killing the Infected was the thing he could agree on.

Heller pursed his lips but obediently turned on his heel, heading north. He had an earpiece in his ear and it crackled once as the comm channels opened. None of the information Riley had just dispensed was new to him or the other soldiers, it had been covered in the pre-mission briefing. And while it may have been a while, he was still familiar enough with Brooklyn to navigate himself around. The streets here were narrow and difficult to manoeuvre, which is why they didn't have much in heavy support.

Yesterday, he wouldn't have thought much about having Blackwatch at his back. Now, all Heller could think of was that he had a great big target on his head and fifteen guns pointed straight at it _(and maybe even an enemy inside himself)_. His shoulders began to hunch as he picked his way down the street across shattered pavement and abandoned cars. The footsteps on the troops behind him, the metallic clinks of their assault rifles as they adjusted their weapons, it felt like being up in front of a freaking firing squad.

Heller encountered his first Infected a mile down the street. It screeched at him before diving through an open window from the ground level shop to get at him. It -he, now that the man was close enough to see- made for an easy shot as he wobbled upright again but no Blackwatch troop attempted to kill the walker. Heller took a deep breath and let the Infected approach.

Come on, come on…

The voice was _there_ , suddenly _._ Its presence was unmistakable - and stronger than it had been before.

Shit.

Heller didn't allow himself to get caught up with what was going on inside his own head. He'd had plenty of practice these last few months with the whispers intruding randomly into his mind at any moment. His right arm transformed into a deadly set of claws and he launched himself at the Infected.

 _You,_ he snapped as he tore an enormous bloody hole in the man's chest. But where there was one walker, inevitably there were more. Scores of them began to drop from the apartments above him and Heller quickly turned on them. His earpiece crackled as Riley began to bark orders to the other soldiers. _Who the fuck are you?_

Please, let the voice be a product of his own insanity…and man, was that a fucked up thing to be wishing for. Because he had no idea what he was going to do if the other thing was true...

The voice was quiet for a moment and Heller could almost feel it mulling the question over. He was struck once again by the ridiculousness of the situation. He was interrogating a voice inside his own damn head. _Alex Mercer_ , it answered slowly, like it was having difficulty remembering. _No. Mercer was **his** name. I just took it and made it my own._

GREAT. Like that fucking helped Heller decide whether he had two feet planted in crazyland or Alex fucking Mercer inside his brain. He had a voice in his head that was having an identity crisis. What sort of person wanted to have the name a mass murdering terrorist anyway? You'd have to be insane-

Oh.

 _What the fuck does that even mean?_ he snarled, frustrated by the lack of clear answers. _Who are you working with? Are you with Blackwatch?_

That got a strong response. Heller could almost taste the intense disgust and hate on his tongue. Actually, no wait, that might have been a bit of walker gore. Fuckers were everywhere.

 _Never._ _Blackwatch would have burnt everything. I...all I ever wanted was answers._

Answers, huh? Heller could sure do with some. Preferably in the near future. Starting now. _How are you Mercer and not Mercer?_

Maybe there had been someone who'd gone through the same experiments Heller had. Maybe Blackwatch and Gentek had done this before. Maybe Alex Mercer was a code-name that got passed on to the experimental subjects and the last one got out of hand and Heller was now the next Mercer in a long line of Mercers. Maybe they all had creepy voices that whispered weird shit in their head. God, he didn't know what the fuck was going on anymore.

It struck Heller, then and there, that he had no idea who Alex Mercer actually was. He knew the name, yes but nothing more. Just a sullen face on the news, a bogeyman that was spoken about hushed voices among the Marines. But there had been no videos where Alex Mercer declared his intentions to destroy the city, had sought to explain the motivation for his mad actions. Only that static, unsmiling image in the news at which Heller had devoted all of his hatred and rage at. For all that Mercer had done, the sheer volume of devastation he'd unleashed upon New York, the amount of information about the man as a person was scarce. There was almost nothing at all.

How could he tell whether he was dealing with the real thing or not?

_I was-Alex Mercer worked for Gentek. The original Mercer. I'm not him. Thought I was, that that was my name. Yes. No. No, I'm not him._

-the original Mercer. Like there were fucking two of him, an evil twin perhaps or maybe even a series of experimental subjects or clones. Heller couldn't think of a more horrifying prospect. Or, well who the fuck knew what Blackwatch had its grubby paws in.

 _Mercer infiltrated Gentek to steal their super soldier formula,_ Heller snapped back, trying to remember what Blackwatch had told him, testing to see how far the inconsistencies lay with what the voice knew. If the voice was just from his head, then it could only know what he knew, right? _He used it on himself then corrupted the rest of it into a bioweapon. There was only one man._

The presence had been wavering, uncertain. At Heller's declaration, it focused. _What? No,_ the voice was adamant. _No, that's not what happened. Mercer worked for Gentek. He did his job. A cure for cancer, they said. But it wasn't. It was…it was something else. A bioweapon? Yes, that's sounds right. There was nothing about …super soldiers._

Heller ducked an outstretched arm and punched the walker so hard, its chest exploded into a nasty shower of Infected gore. A month ago, he'd have flinched back and tried to avoid it. The former marine ignored the disgusting shower. He cared for only one thing in that statement.

_Gentek was building bioweapons?! The virus-are you telling me it was their fault?_

_The outbreak…the outbreak started when…_ the voice trailed off distantly. It paused. _I remember now - I woke up in a morgue. I didn't know anything except that the world wanted me dead. I didn't know why. I wore his face and everyone thought I was Mercer. And for a long time, so did I._

Heller had fallen silent. He grunted as he ducked a walker that had rushed at his back. One swipe of his claws and bye-bye zombie face. His momentum carried him forward a few steps and he eviscerated a couple more Infected before finding an unexpected pause in the battle. He'd cleared the Infected closest to him and more were gathering themselves up to attack but he'd got a little breathing room, if only for a moment. Occasionally, Heller heard a brief burst of gunfire as strays went for the Blackwatch troops trailing behind him. In his right ear was a stream of chatter that he was currently ignoring, figuring that Riley would bark his name if they needed him for something.

Heller took advantage of his momentary respite to glance behind him, checking to see if he'd lost any of his highly armed camera crew. They were all there and accounted for. It wasn't too far to go now, but Heller knew how Hives worked. It would only get more difficult as they got closer.

It was really fucking confusing trying to keep track of everything, both what was going on in the fight and the timeline of what the voice (Not Alex Mercer, apparently but someone who had taken his name? Someone who people had thought was Alex Mercer and who had also believed the same?) was telling him now in addition to what he'd been told last night. There was no super solider serum. Gentek had been building a bioweapon ( _and Gentek and Blackwatch were two different sides of the same coin, fuck where the hell did Heller stand now?_ ). And Alex Mercer –who the fuck was the guy even. Him. Them. Whatever. How the hell did they fit into the whole thing?

The fuck was going on?

 _Look, I don't...I don't understand,_ Heller said, frustrated, throwing himself back into the fray and eviscerating two Infected. _You're not Mercer. But you-you looked like him. People thought you were him. Is that what Blackwatch does? Try to turn people into him? Is that what is going to happen to me?_

Sergeant James Heller. Number _x_ out of _n_ Alex Mercers. The fuck he'd gotten himself into.

None of this was making any sense and he wished he could be carrying out this line of questioning at literally _any_ other time. He had bits and pieces of the puzzle but he couldn't line them up, couldn't think critically over the information he had, not when he was punching walkers in the face or ripping out their guts. Heller might have gotten used to the voices in his head intruding in the middle of a fight but that didn't mean he was able to unravel a conspiracy in the middle of it. And while walkers weren't that much of a challenge, they had the advantage of near infinite numbers; the battle still did require his attention.

 _No._ Not Alex Mercer who went by Alex Mercer's name replied, sounding deeply puzzled. _I don't...I don't think so...I don't know what they've done to you. To us._

Amen to that, mysterious voice inside Heller's brain. Neither did he.

 _In fact...who are you?_ the voice asked.

Heller punched his arm through a walker's head. _How can you be inside my head and not know who I am?_ He frowned, shook his arm and flicked the gore from it. _How does that even work? For that matter, how did you get inside my brain?_

_An explosion...I was caught in it. That's the last thing I remember before...all of this. I was trying to...I can't remember... Randal had something planned-_

Images suddenly invaded Heller's vision for a moment, a man missing an arm- he was dressed in the uniform of a Blackwatch general- _'When you have a festering wound, you cauterize it-'_ and unbelievable heat swept over his skin as he-no, it was the voice- _burned and burned until there was nothing left at all. It should have been the end; he'd thought it was the end until he'd woken up on that table. But he didn't know what was happening then, didn't understand and before he could figure it out, he **slept.**_

 _General Randall had a plan_ ; the voice finished slowly, a thick sense of confusion enveloping it. _It threatened the entire city, I think. I had to stop it._

Heller staggered, not prepared for the distraction the visions caused, and the walker he was fighting seized upon the opportunity. Fingers that had been mutated into small, twisted claws raked at his face, swiping an ear then tearing into the skin of his forehead and across his nose, narrowly missing an eye. Heller's head snapped back at the blow and he was vaguely aware that the ear piece had been dislodged and fallen to the ground. He reeled at the unexpected pain, even though his flesh was already prickling away, healing itself. Heller ignored the blood trickling down his face and lashed out, beheading his attacker with a satisfying slash of his own claws.

The marine focused back on the fight, deciding that his questions and the mysteries that Not Alex Mercer presented could wait for another time. Heller ignored that the voice was continuing to speak. None of it mattered if he died out here because he was distracted.

The former marine eyed the crowd of walkers warily. _Don't_ , Heller snapped at the voice. _Don't ever do that again. What the fuck was that? No- shut up. Don't say anything. We'll continue this later._

Then-

A roar cut through the crowded street, it reverberated through the concrete and for a moment, it seemed to command the attention of both Infected and the soldiers that fought them. Heller took advantage of the momentary lull; he shoved the walker in front of him away and then leapt back, craning his head around to identify the source of the sound.

That better not be a fucking-

 _Hunter_ , the voice murmured, finishing Heller's thought. _I can remember that much._

He ignored the voice, pushing it back again to a corner of his mind. Heller had plenty of practice from dealing with the whispers over the last few weeks. Red Crown's info had suggested their target site hadn't progressed to the point that these monsters would be about. But Riley hadn't been willing to rule it out and had been sure to cover the possibility during the mission briefing.

Well, looked like the lieutenant had called it-

Loud footsteps pounded against concrete and then glass shattered as the massive creature came barrelling out from the second floor of the building right across the street from Heller. It had smashed through a window and then hurtled through the air and hit the tarmac with a terrible crack, leaving a crater behind at the point of impact. Despite the ridiculous height it had fallen from, the beast was unscathed and had barely slowed its breakneck momentum. It swung its head around and surveyed the battlefield.

Fuck.

Heller had a few seconds to keenly regret all his life decisions that lead up to this precise moment. Because it had been one thing to push past all bit of common sense and fight the Infected Blackwatch set on him hand to hand but it hadn't really sunk in until this very moment that this would extend to ALL types of Infected. Heller had known, in a vague sort of way, that he'd be expected to fight hunters, hydras and whatever new variants were spawned out of the red zone but the reality of that expectation was only just hitting him now.

Shit.

He wasn't given long to stew in his recriminations. Without his earpiece, Heller had no idea what orders Riley had given in response to the new threat. But the sudden burst of gunfire at the hunter was a clue. The bullets pelted across the creature's thick skin and succeeded in attracting the beast's attention aaaand not much else.

It swung its head round.

Unfortunately, Heller was much further along the street than Riley's team and, consequently, was much closer to the hunter. So he fell into the beast's view much sooner than the other troops did.

Shiiiiit.

It bellowed again and then charged at Heller with frightful speed. God knows how many pounds of Infected flesh steamrolled over any of its brethren unfortunate enough to get in its path as it tried to get to him.

Heller was 950% not okay with this.

He threw himself to the side, shoving and elbowing several infected people out of his path to accomplish this. But they hampered his movements and his ability to recover, Heller couldn't track what the hunter was doing while he was preoccupied with five walkers clawing at him.

Heller heard another roar - _too close, far too fucking close-_ and suddenly something had slammed into his side, knocking him off his feet and into the air. He hit the opposing wall with a sickening crack and then all Heller could focus on was the agony that had erupted all up the left side of his body as he gasped frantically for air.

Shitshitshit-

He couldn't stay down. Staying down was a death sentence. He couldn't remember closing his eyes but with the way his head was spinning now, Heller didn't even try to open them. Getting up was what was important. Gritting his teeth against the pain (only to realise - _fuck!_ \- that it only made the pain worse), he weakly peeled himself off the wall.

Once he was upright, Heller cracked open an eye. The crowd of Infected was thinner; it was the first thing that he noticed. Then he noticed that the gunfire had picked up, hitting that wall had shrunk down his awareness to only himself. Guess Riley had upped his game and bought Heller a few seconds. Blood trickled down the side of Heller's face even as his regen finally kicked in and his wounds began to heal. The sharp stabs of pain he'd been feeling tamped down to a dull ache.

The one bright side, Heller woozily assessed, was the hunter had thrown him a short distance away into a less crowded area. So when it came for him again, he was able to duck out of his way without any Infected jumping him, then he was able to swipe at the creature's back with his claws.

His attack hacked into the hunter's hide, penetrating its hide but not that deeply. Heller had a second to make this realisation -he'd known that hunter skin was not like normal Infected skin which meant that claw attacks that would normally rip apart regular Infected were not that effective but he had never put it to the test- then the beast swung round and swatted him with one massive paw.

 _Why-_ Not Mercer's voice, as Heller staggered back, drifting in and out, sounding less coherent than before, _-only claws?_

No, no, distractions. Heller shut out whatever else the voice had to say and shoved it back into a corner. He watched the hunter warily, waiting for its next move.

The distance between the two enemies was much shorter than it had been before. This time, when the hunter ploughed forward and Heller ducked out of its way again, the hunter hadn't built up as much momentum as before. Heller was quickly discovering that the hunter was a whole other level to fighting the walkers. Hunters moved, well, not like a human at all. He wasn't prepared for that, hadn't trained to deal with it. The beast surprised him by being able to adjust it course and follow Heller through, ramming into his side with its shoulder, slamming him into a wall and pinning him into place.

Heller heard a lot of things crack and it wasn't just the wall.

_Fuckfuckfuck-_

A fresh burst-no, explosion- of pain came over him. He couldn't help the cry that escaped him. This was accompanied by a wave of dizziness and nausea from the impossible pressure on his midriff.

His vision swam and Heller just really, really wanted to puke.

Puke on a hunter for his last actions. Heller let out a pained and shaky wheeze that was a sad attempt at a hysterical laugh.

He had no real leverage to push the hunter off. His weak attempts barely budged the beast. Instead, Heller got to endure being uncomfortably close and personal with the creature, wedged between it and the wall. The hunter's skin was feverishly hot and it stank like blood and rotten flesh and wow, that was so not helping the nausea. Puking on the damn hunter seemed like it was actually going to become reality.

Then, suddenly, that immense pressure pinning him against the wall vanished along with the hunter's bulk and Heller slumped forward gracelessly to the ground. His arms flew out to catch him from smacking straight onto the pavement, Heller peered warily up to see why the hunter had let him go-

Oh.

Oh, it hadn't.

The thing had reared its head back and opened its maw, revealing a fuckton of _teeth_. Squished against the wall, the hunter hadn't been able to chew Heller's head off like it wanted. But now with him on the _ground-_

The hunter's jaws lunged forward.

And somewhere, somehow, between reeling with the agony and just flat out exhaustion, Heller retained the presence of mind to drive his clawed fist into the hunter's mouth.

Unfortunately for the hunter, the inside of its maw were nowhere near as tough and impenetrable as its hide was. Heller's claws punctured the softer tissue and scraped roughly against bone. The creature seized once and went still as Heller gasped for air, frantically staring up at the dead beast at the end of his arm. Somehow, it hadn't toppled over; his arm shook with the effort of keeping up the hunter's bulk.

Holy fuck.

That actually worked.

He was still alive.

It took effort but Heller managed to stagger upright. His claws made horrible sticky, squelching sounds as he moved, jostling them about in the hunter's mouth. When he was upright, he finally pulled his claw free with one last horrible squelch and stepped back, allowing the hunter's body to thump to the space Heller had just been occupying on the ground.

Having just got vertical again, the former marine stumbled backwards then collapsed down to one knee when the effort to remain standing proved to be too much. Shit.

He lifted his head up and squinted down at the street. Where had all those soldiers appeared from? he wondered dizzily. Because he was certain that there were a lot more than when they had started out. Riley had to have called for reinforcements once the hunter had shown and now the Blackwatch troops had almost finished mopping up the crowd of walkers while Heller had been preoccupied with the hunter.

The soldiers were ignoring him for the moment, doing their job with that characteristic viciousness Blackwatch was known for. Riley had to have figured out that Heller was off the comm channels now and the former marine figured that if the lieutenant had new orders for him, someone would have trudged over to communicate them now that Heller was significantly hunter-free.

For now, Heller was content to be ignored while he caught his breath and let his body attempt to patch itself up.

That hunter had to have cracked -and broken?- some bones. Or whatever his body had now, fuck if Heller knew what it was doing these days with its constant mutations. But with his regenerative abilities and high pain threshold, it was difficult to tell what the full extent of the damage was. But what he did know was that there was a point where he would need to take a break; where the shapeshifting and healing came to a grinding halt. He wasn't quite _there_ yet but from the sluggish rate that his healing was going at, Heller knew he was dangerously close.

It's too soon to relax or drop his guard even by a minuscule amount.

But Heller does it anyway, even though it was a fucking stupid thing to do in an active combat zone.

His attention wavered, his eyes closed on their own volition and for a moment, all he could hear was the sound of his breathing as he took in and processed the unbelievable fact that he was still alive. Battered, in pain, exhausted but _alive._ He was too wrapped up in marveling over this simple fact that he missed the commotion when it first started, those precious seconds passing without his notice.

...Riley's men were yelling…

Heller blinked his eyes open, puzzled and not really comprehending what was going on initially.

Several metres away, a hunter - _another fucking hunter, where the fuck had it and those walkers come from-_ ripped one of the Blackwatch soldiers in half.

_No-_

It took more energy than he was expecting but Heller climbed back to his feet. Where the hunter had come from wasn't important. What mattered was stopping the damn thing before it-

-killed another soldier like it had just done right now.

Damnit.

It hurt. Every movement caused throbbing pain and aches to flare up from a part of his body. The previous hunter had done such a number on him that there wasn't a part of Heller that wasn't making it known just how bad it was. And if he was really, really honest with himself, he didn't want to go for another round with a hunter.

Hell, the first one had almost killed him. A second one would definitely finish the job.

Indecision struck him then, as his long buried -and dead, he'd believed- will to live and self-preservation baulked at the idea of engaging the new beast. He was injured and on the verge of collapsing, surely no one could expect him to charge forth and engage the new hunter?

But people were dying.

What was the point of getting himself turned into a mutated freak if he was going to sit by and let people -even Blackwatch- die in front of him?

What else was he good for?

Heller was running for the hunter before he even registered it. On a good day, he probably would have had the hunter beat when it came down to speed. But as it was, Heller reached the beast just as it was bearing down on a third troop without a single moment to spare. Heller didn't have the wits or the time to be gentle; he shoved the man -pretty much bowled into him in fact- out of the way without checking his strength.

He heard the soldier cry out -alarm? pain? both?- but he couldn't check to see if the man was alright on account of being steamrolled by a hunter for the third time in less than five minutes.

...he really had to stop doing this.

This time, Heller wasn't thrown into a wall, the hunter knocked him backwards off his feet, and Heller went _down,_ trampled under the fucking thing's weight.

_Ohfuckfuckfuckfuuuuck…_

The not fun and extremely painful combination of claws plus fucktons of pure _heavy_ pressed down on him as the hunter ploughed on over him. Was that nausea he was feeling again? Yes, yes it was, along with every other possible form of pain he was experiencing. Black dots spread across his vision and he could feel himself getting fainter by the second.

It only lasted a few seconds but it felt much longer. Then the pressure was gone, the hunter's momentum carrying it forward and off him, the beast had been expecting to mow down a puny unaltered human, which Heller had replaced in the last possible moment. Heller groaned and rolled onto his front, but didn't -couldn't- get up further than on his knees.

Then, the vague crawling sensation, the prickling from his body sluggishly healing, vanished.

His claws disappeared along with it, right in front of his disbelieving eyes.

...shit.

There went his only weapon.

The hunter was already wheeling around and coming back for round two. Thoughts of defending himself or running perhaps drifted vaguely through Heller's head while he stared dumbly at his bare hands.

Well, this was it.

The approaching hunter bore down on him.

That was when he felt it.

That feeling. He hadn't forgotten it. The presence - _Not Mercer?_ \- moving inside him, manipulating his core. His right arm shimmered -wasn't he past the point of shapeshifting...?- and, right before his incredulous eyes, sprouted into that wicked looking blade.

What-

Hadn't he lost that-?

Heller's head snapped up. His perception of time seemed to have sped up. Or maybe the hunter and the rest of the world had _slowed down_. In a daze, like he wasn't quite in control of himself, he stood up and slashed forward his arm- _blade_ \- at the hunter's throat. Not once- thrice in the span of a heartbeat, before lining his arm - _blade_ \- up and letting the hunter's own charge carry its damaged neck onto the tip of his blade, skewering it right through the throat.

Heller's arm shuddered at the impact, it occurred to him a moment late that with his blade firmly punctured through the beast, there was no way to dodge-

The hunter's dead carcass slammed into Heller.

Everything went blissfully dark after that.


End file.
